The year 1609 saw the first appearance of a weekly newspaper in German. The new medium caught on so quickly that almost every urban centre soon had a newspaper of its own. The newspapers' main readership was made up of court representatives, aldermen, theologicans and scholars but the 'common man' also took a lively interest. Given their widespread dissemination, these newspapers were a major factor in the emergence of a uniform national language. The articles in the present volume examine the textual structures, syntactic patterns and the vocabulary employed in these newspapers. The central issue is the emergence and development of an idiom typical of newspaper style in the 17th century. Further topics are how up-to-the-minute, accurate and comprehensible the reporting was and the contemporary critical response to these newspapers and the language they employed.