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Journalism in the modern sense is one of the younger professions. The first prototype of the modern newspaper was the series of public announcements. This was known during the Roman Empire as Acta Diurna and later in Venice as the Gazzetta. Similar official reports were made in China. There the earliest newspaper, the Tching-pao, or News of the Palace, began its daily appearance in Peking in the middle of the 8th century A.D. Until the invention of printing, the dissemination of news was largely dependent on private correspondence or word of mouth. The invention of printing from movable type by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in about 1450 revolutionized the spreading of news. According to one tradition, the first printed newssheet appeared in Nuremberg in 1457. The letter of Christopher Columbus announcing in 1493 the results of his first expedition to the New World was distributed as a news broadside. The announcement of the British triumph over the Spanish Armada in July 1588 also was a news broadside. Some 800 of these occasional news sheets (all printed before 1610) are extant in libraries. This kind of publishing became a profitable business; as a result, the reporting of news spread rapidly throughout Europe.

The following paragraph most likely discusses ____.