Information brokering, the business of buying and selling information as a commodity, has been around for a long time. A business historian can make a good case that it started with Gutenberg in the middle 1400s, when what had been a closely held church and government prerogative involving the distribution of "original works of art" gave way to mass production and the business of book publishing.
By the 1700s, faster, time-sensitive techniques for information distribution took hold. First the newspaper and then the magazine made smaller, but timelier, chunks of information available to the public, and venture capital investment opportunities were available for those who wished to back entrepreneurial publishers.
Information brokering as we now think of it as a business opportunity for the individual information professional was begun by the French in 1935.
