Newspaper price wars
by the King’s Messengers, practically at their
discretion. Though several warrants were no
longer legal after 1766, the Stamp Duty and other
taxes on knowledge were burgeoning until the
middle of the nineteenth century, when massive
and sustained press and popular pressure led
to the reduction and eventual abolition of the
duties.
New technology, the growth of advertising
and a more literate general public contributed to
a massive expansion of newspapers in the latter
half of the nineteenth century. In 1821 there had
been 267 newspapers, including weeklies, in
the UK; by 1861 there were 1,102. Newspaper
trains, which began running in 1876, meant
that the London papers could reach all parts of
the country, while telegraphy speeded news,
increasingly provided by the news agencies
(Paul Julius Reuter opened his London office
in 1851). By 1880 London had eighteen dailies;
in the English provinces there were ninety-six
dailies, four in Wales, twenty-one in Scotland
and seventeen in Ireland.
The most dramatic example of the rise in
the popularity of newspapers was the boom in
Sunday papers, whose audience, writes Anthony
Smith in The Newspaper: An International
History (Thames & Hudson, 1979), ‘came
increasingly to consist of the newly literate who
could not afford six papers a week and were
interested in non-political news. The Sunday
journals traded in horrible murders, ghastly
seductions and lurid rapes, but they were
combined with a distinct brand of radicalism’.
Edward Lloyd’s Weekly News, founded in 1842,
was the fi rst periodical to reach a circulation of
a million, leaving the highest-selling daily paper,
the Daily Telegraph, with a 200,000 circulation- well behind.
The pattern for the future was set: new
technology facilitated (and made economi-
cally necessary) massive print runs; journalism
aimed for vast readerships; advertising became
more and more the staple financial support
of the press; ownership rested with very rich
individuals or joint stock companies; readership
patterns hardened along lines of social class;
and competition became increasingly desperate.
See democracy and the media; journalism;
northcliffe revolution; photo-journal-
ism; press barons. See also topic guide under
media history.
Newspeak As opposed to Oldspeak in George
Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
where private thought and individual language
were crimes against the totalitarian state of
off , Th e Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and
Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 4th
edition, 2010); Susan L. Carruthers, Th e Media at
War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 2011); Garth
S. Jowett, Propaganda and Persuasion (Sage, 5th
edition, 2011).
Newspaper price wars See predatory pric-
ing.
Newspapers, origins Th e earliest newspapers in
Britain were far more internationalist in outlook
and interest than they tend to be today. The
reason for this was the extensive censorship of
home news by monarch and council. As early as
the seventeenth century there was the so-called
Relation, the publication of a single news
story, usually related long after the events. Th e
Coranto served to join individual Relations into
a continuity, though still not appearing regularly.
Th e Diurnall was a step forward, providing a
weekly account of occurrences over several days.
Like the others before it, the Mercury appeared
in book-like form, but bore more prominently
the individual stamp of writers and tended to
be more immediate and more diverse. During
the Civil War (1642–46) Mercuries appeared in
great abundance, even on Sundays.
Contemporaneous with the Mercury was the
Intelligencer, usually more formal, aspiring to
be ‘offi cial’; a notable example was Th e Publick
Intelligencer published with the blessing of
Protector Oliver Cromwell. Indeed the street
journalism of all kinds that emerged in the heady
days of the English Civil War laid the basis for
the popular journalism we recognize today. In
the twenty years between 1640 and the restora-
tion of the monarchy under Charles II, 30,000
news publications and pamphlets emerged in
London alone.
Th e date usually cited for London’s fi rst regu-
lar daily paper is 1702. Th e intention of Samuel
Buckley’s Daily Courant was ‘to give news, give it
daily and impartially’, and it continued for 6,000
editions. By 1750 London had fi ve daily papers,
six thrice-weeklies, five weeklies and several
other periodicals, all amounting to a circulation
of 100,000 copies a week.
Th e Stamp Act of 1712 heralded over a century
of increasing concern on the part of the authori-
ties about the proliferation and influence of
newspapers. Government agents reported on
the contents of newspapers and there was a
bristling array of laws to use against the press,
such as seditious libel and profanation.
Of dubious legality but considerable eff ective-
ness was the general warrant enabling arrests
and seizures of unnamed persons to be made