This paper explores the links between the emergence of Modern Standard Arabic, or fuṣḥā, and the proliferation of periodicals after the introduction of print technology in the nahḍa. I assume that cheap access to news and periodicals transformed the modes of knowledge production and defined the limits and contents of the known. This paper outlines how news (which is a particular genre of knowledge production) was mediated: how it was enabled and through what constraints. As I argue, the material particularity of the nahda periodicals gave rise to a structural relationship between standard Arabic and forms of translated knowledge. One way of examining news as a novel form of knowledge production is to analyze the relationship that linked the emergence of fuṣḥā with the heavy reliance on translation in the nahda. As an imported technology that translated knowledge of the world (including the world of local Arab provinces) from Western periodicals, the nahda periodical proliferated translation as the cardinal tool for mediating and commoditizing forms of knowledge. My specific focus on how periodicals mediated the relationship between translation and fuṣḥā maintains methodological interest in a text’s materiality as it shapes and affects language-use.I am interested in how the changing materiality mediated the world: what it enabled, what it constrained. I borrow the analytical concept of mediation from the history of science and specifically from the work of Clifford Siskin and William Warner to show that fuṣḥā emerged as a protocol of control that was consequent upon the wide spread proliferation of the periodical as a defining aspect of this genre’s materiality. Through analyzing the periodical as a tool of knowledge, I will first describe the changes in writing news about the present and will then closely read selected news items that were published in the nascent nahda periodicals. My paper will primarily unpack the well-known polemical language debate between two main figures of the early Levantine nahda, Ahmad Faris Shidyaq and Ibrahim al-Yaziji. As I show, in this debate, which unfolded in a series of exchanges in Al-Jawaib and al-Jinan in the early 1870s, the stakes of the argument for controlling language-use show the extent to which translation became the cardinal mediation paradigm for knowledge of the world. As I show, periodicals proliferated this cardinal mediation which in turn produced linguistic effect, in the form of fuṣḥā as a grammatical protocol of control.