Informative reports or media coverage of current events, as distinguished from gossip and propaganda, also known as "domestic intelligence"; derived from "novelty". Although news agencies existed during the decline of the Roman Empire in Italy and the Han Dynasty in China, town criers heralded recent activities without compensation until the implicit social stratification in the coffee house and salon subcultures of the Medieval era made commercial presentation of news profitable. The survival value of information shifts over time from the forewarned community to the knowledgeable individual, until excess exchange compels cultural reassessment. The busybody, gossip monger, tattler, hawker, crier, and herald have been displaced by the news teller, newsreader, newscaster, newsman, journalist, moderator, commentator; who fear the "Scheherazade Syndrome" of perishing if their audience ever becomes bored! Newsworthy stories are dispensed, based upon their impact, timeliness, proximity, emotion, importance, prominence, unusualness. The free flow of news has always been a threat to authority, since shared disclosures only reinforce stable societies. See newspaper, newsletter, news book, tabloid, gazette, journal, documentary, bully pulpit, expose, screed, disinformation, mediagenic, copyboy, deskman, muckraker, yellow journalism.