The Business Of News In England 1760 1820

The Business of News in England, 1760-1820 explores the commerce of the English press during a critical period of press politicization, as the nation confronted foreign wars and revolutions that disrupted domestic governance.

The Business of News in England, 1760-1820 explores the commerce of the English press during a critical period of press politicization, as the nation confronted foreign wars and revolutions that disrupted domestic governance.

The Business of News in England, 1760-1820 explores the commerce of the English press during a critical period of press politicization, as the nation confronted foreign wars and revolutions that disrupted domestic governance.

Travelling Chronicles presents fourteen episodes in the history of news, written by some of the leading scholars in the rapidly developing fields of news and newspaper studies. Ranging across eastern and western Europe and beyond, the chapters look back to the early modern period and into the eighteenth century to consider how the news of the past was gathered and spread, how news outlets gained respect and influence, how news functioned as a business, and also how the historiography of news can be conducted with the resources available to scholars today. Travelling Chronicles offers a timely analysis of early news, at a moment when historical newspaper archives are being widely digitalised and as the truth value of news in our own time undergoes intense scrutiny.

This book dispels myths surrounding the newspaper industry’s financial viability in an online world, arguing that widespread predictions of pending newspaper extinction are based mostly on misunderstandings of the industry’s operations. Drawing from his training as a business journalist, Marc Edge undertakes a thorough analysis of annual financial statements provided by newspaper companies themselves to explain the industry’s arcane economics. This book contextualizes available data within the historical context in which various news publishers operate and outlines the economic history of UK newspapers. It also investigates how UK newspapers survived the 2008–09 recession, considering both national and provincial markets separately. A rigorous look at an often-neglected aspect of the newspaper industry, this volume will be an essential read for scholars of media studies, journalism studies, and communication studies, especially those interested in studying journalism and news production as occupational identities.

Extending the limits of the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and its companion volume (and also award-winning) Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. The collection’s innovative focus on the nineteenth-century British press’s relationship to work illuminates an area whose effects are still evident today but which has been almost totally neglected hitherto. Offering bold new interpretative frameworks and provocative methodologies in media history and literary studies developed by an exciting group of new and established talent, this volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.

In this book, the ownership, distribution and sale of patent medicines across Georgian England are explored for the first time, transforming our understanding of healthcare provision and the use of the printed word in that era. Patent medicines constituted a national industry which was largely popular, reputable and stable, not the visible manifestation of dishonest quackery as described later by doctors and many historians. Much of the distribution, promotion and sale of patent medicines was centrally controlled with directed advertising, specialisation, fixed prices and national procedures, and for the first time we can see the detailed working of a national market for a class of Georgian consumer goods. Furthermore, contemporaries were aware that changes in the consumers’ ‘imagination’ increased the benefits of patent medicines above the effects of their pharmaceutical components. As the imagination was altered by the printed word, print can be considered as an essential ingredient of patent medicines. This book will challenge the assumptions of all those interested in the medical, business or print history of the period.

Uses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture. Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period. The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.