Messrelationen are seen as precursors to modern newspapers as they were the first printed news media to be published periodically.
The Austrian scholar Michael von Aitzing (ca.
1530–1598) is commonly seen as their inventor, having published for the first time a Relatio Historica ('Historical Report', printed in Cologne) at the autumn 1583 book fair in Frankfurt, in which he related the events in the Low Countries since February 1580 on 144 quarto pages.
The historian Ulrich Rosseaux argues „to view the Messrelationen as a separate type of Early Modern media whose essential properties are the periodicity, respectability and compactness of its reports.
From the perspective of their publishers, they acted as a continuously amended chronicle of the present and therefore a constitutive part of contemporaneous historiography.“[1] The Messrelationen, which encompassed on average 100 pages, drew their news from correspondents or (non-periodical) newssheets (Newe Zeytungen).