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Fake news is effective because it tells you something about the world that you, in a way, already know. This may sound counterintuitive. But a look into the work of a 19th-century fake news writer helps explain this phenomenon – and what’s going on today.

Fake news flourished in the 19th century. During that period, newspaper and magazine circulation skyrocketed due to innovations in printing technology and cheaper paper. Professional news agencies set up shop in major cities all over the world, while the telegraph enabled messages to be rapidly sent across continents.

One strategy involved sending foreign correspondents abroad. The idea was that the correspondents could provide stories and analysis from a personal point of view that readers might find more appealing than the standard, impersonal reports that emerged from news agencies.

However, sending a reporter abroad was expensive, and not every paper could shoulder the cost. Those that couldn’t found a creative and much cheaper solution: They hired local staff writers to pretend they were sending dispatches from abroad. By the 1850s, the phenomenon was so widespread in Germany that it had become its own genre – the “unechte Korrespondenz,” or “fake foreign correspondent’s letter,” as people in the German news trade called it.

One such fake correspondent was Theodor Fontane, a German pharmacist-turned-journalist who would go on to write some of the most important German Realist novels. (If you’ve never heard of Fontane, think of him as the German Dickens.)

In 1860, Fontane – struggling to make ends meet – joined the staff of the Kreuzzeitung, an ultra-conservative Berlin newspaper. The paper assigned him to cover England, and for a decade, he published story after story “from” London, spellbinding his readers with “personal” accounts of dramatic events, like the devastating Tooley Street Fire of 1861.

But during the entire decade, he never actually crossed the English Channel.

The stunning thing – and the part that resonates today – is how Fontane pulled it off. Fontane’s story about the Great Fire illustrates his process.

By the time he decided to write about the fire, it had already been raging for days, and reports about it were in virtually all the papers.

More: http://theconversation.com/techniques-of-19th-century-fake-news-reporter-teach-us-why-we-fall-for-it-today-75583

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