ABSTRACT
The news and economic activity are two closely related phenomena. Ever since writing helped human beings to manage in society, the recording and transmission of relevant information about events related to their economic and commercial activities have been essential tasks. However, it was not until the sixteenth century, one hundred years after Gutenberg developed the use of movable type, and during a period of great commercial expansion resulting from the discovery and exploitation of the New World, that we can speak of the creation of stable and advanced systems for the dissemination of economic news. Since then, the development of economic journalism has been marked by the intersection of historical events in several interrelated fields: the history of economics and finance, the history of economic thought, the history of technology, and the history of media and journalism. This chapter examines this evolution in five stages, coinciding with the development of commercial capitalism (price currents), industrial capitalism (economic magazines), financial capitalism (financial newspapers and business magazines), state capitalism (economic newspapers, business sections in general dailies, and the first audiovisual business news), and popular capitalism (popularization of business and economic news and development of multimedia content). In all of these phases, economic and financial booms and busts, the struggle between new and old economic ideas, certain social and political changes, the emergence of new professions, and the implementation of technological advances have been the key factors in the configuration of economic and business journalism.
