In addition to op-eds, many people would write letters to be read in public, at churches, in the public squares or at pubs. Reading was not the solitary activity that we think of today, but often done as a gathering with people taking turns reading letters, books and sermons to each other.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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In ancient Rome, at least, walls! Graffiti was widespread and often involved exchanges between people. This is Rufus!
The (now) proverbial soap box.
Other than that, nothing. In the past, newspapers were basically the only source of information and opinion with regional, national or international reach.
That's why the freedom of the press is so important.
There were some public or semi-public billboards where you could post leaflets.
But only the invention of the internet allowed private citizens without any financial capital to broadcast to millions, if their message was catchy enough.
Those with something to say, and the means to afford it, might have a run of pamphlets printed which they could distribute to friends, aquantences and even the general public. You can browse a number of collections of pamphlets on JSTOR.
Not entirely sure what specific context that you mean: newspaper, the library, the university, the public square?
That's what I'm not sure of, like where would something like public blogs have appeared in the past? I know the private version is basically a journal or diary, but I'm not as sure if those were sometimes more publicly shared in the past or not.
To be more specific, by blog I'm thinking like personal, individual writings on whatever they happened to be thinking about or interested in.
One of the ways would have been Letters to the editor, which were basically blog posts written by individuals who are not journalists, published in a newspaper. Of course the editor had to approve of what you had to say so it wasn't a perfectly free medium.
These existed well into the 20th century even into 1990s.
Going back in past there was the option of nailing pamphlets to churches, however this was highly dependent on having friends with a printing press which was the cutting edge technology for the time.
We used to have Op-Ed sections in newspapers and they used to be literal sections, and lots of people would mail opinions in and hopefully make the cut, and in internet's not-quite-still-an-infant age, BBS used to be used to such an effect as a blog a lot of times, but nothing was ever on the scale of being able to easily broadcast your thoughts to the world unless you were significant enough
I know the private version is basically a journal or diary, but I’m not as sure if those were sometimes more publicly shared in the past or not.
Prominent figures often had their journals and diaries and letters published by others, but usually that happened after they were dead.