The battle of the Downs: reporting victory and defeat in the early periodical press

The first newspaper publishers of the seventeenth century faced a momentous challenge. How could they compete in a highly competitive news market with their periodical invention? The newspaper was generally a cautious medium, offering an assortment of short international news reports without overarching editorial opinion. The newspaper rarely displayed the wit and polemic present in other news media of the early modern period, and operated with a rigid schedule of publication. This article portrays how such standards could be cast off in the face of military victory and defeat. The naval battle of the Downs in 1639 engaged two rival newspaper markets in Amsterdam and Antwerp. By analysing the simultaneous reporting of the battle in the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Netherlands it becomes clear that newspaper publishers employed numerous tactics in order to shape the coverage of the battle—and to strive for the relevance of their newspapers.