Description

What are the characteristics of the first Portuguese news periodicals? If Portuguese 17th-century news writing was structurally similar to nowadays journalism, may those first Portuguese periodicals be considered newspapers? What was written and how were written the first Portuguese periodicals? What events and issues were awarded importance and to what extent were those events also considered important by nowadays historians? Do the versions of the stories in the first Portuguese periodicals match the historical version from nowadays’ historians?

Questions such as these were the motivation for this research, whose goal is to describe and compare the discourse of the first two Portuguese periodicals (Gazeta (1641-1647) and Mercúrio Português (1663-1667), research object, according to a contextual framework encompassing history, comparativism and journalism.