1. WK 2 – THE INVENTION OF
THE NEWSPAPER – MEDIA
HISTORY
Dr. Carolina Matos
Lecturer in Sociology
Department of Sociology
City University London

2. Core readings
• Essential reading
• Curran, J. and J. Seaton (2010) Power Without Responsibility - 7th Edition.
Routledge. Chapters 1 to 3.
• OR
• Williams, K. (1998) Get Me a Murder a Day: A History of Mass
Communication in Britain. Arnold. Chapters 1 & 2.
•
• Highly recommended reading
• Briggs, A. and P. Burke (2002) A Social History of the Media: From
Gutenberg to the Internet. Polity. Chapters 2 & 3.
• Additional reading
• Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Polity.

3. Key points
• The printed news from the mid-15th century onwards
• The emergence of the newspapers
• The rise and fall of censorship
• The newspaper boom and the age of the coffee house
• Habermas and the public sphere
• The public sphere today
• The radical press
• The ‘taxes on knowledge’
• Conclusions

4. The Printed News (mid-15th century onwards)
• The advent of printing in 1453 (Johann Gutenberg)
• It was thanks to the daily newspaper that print became a part of daily life in
the 18th century:
• “In England alone, it has been estimated that 15 million newspaper were
sold during the year 1792. There were also scholarly journals like…the
News of the Republic of Letters (1684-) which spread information about new
discoveries.” (Briggs and Burke, 2002)
• Printed newsletters
• The emergence of newssheets (or newsbooks)
• First form of periodic news publication
• Carried more news
• Wider public

5. The Emergence of the newspaper (early 17th
century)
• The first newbooks, or corantos , appeared in the 1620s
• Newspapers contributed to the rise of public opinion
• Habermas and the public sphere
• England’s first newspaper: The Weekly Newes (1621)
• Practical difficulties
• Political difficulties

6. The development of the print media and the system
of state control (in Williams, 1998)
* The development of the print media was shaped and influenced by the
intervention of official bodies. Tudor Britain saw the establishment of an
effective and successful system of state control of the media
•The Church had the right to vet all books dealing with religious matters. The
break with the Church increased the role of the secular authorities in
regulating printed material.
• The Tudors granted a royal charter to the Stationer’s Company in 1557. The
Stationer’s Company helped to police what was printed, published and sold: in
other words, a system of self-regulation was established.
•In 1586, the Star Chamber issued a decree aimed at further restricting the
number of printing presses in operation, limiting this to 22, together with the
Queen’s printer and the two university presses at Oxford and Cambridge.

7. The Emergence of the newspaper (early 17th century)
(in Williams, 1998)
• The Weekly Newes took the form of semi-pamphlets (between 8 and 24
pages)
• The emergence of these newsbooks met with hostility from members of the
educated classes. The growth of the news industry was seen as a degradation
of the writer’s function.
• By 1644, there were a dozen weekly newsbooks with eight pages or more
available in London.
• The growth of newsbooks had risen steadily in the years before the Civil
War.
• Newbooks of the Civil War period made several important contributions to
the development of the print media.

8. The Emergence of the newspaper and freedom of the
press (early 17th century) (in Williams, 1998)
• According to Joseph Frank, many of the techniques of modern political
journalism, such as the planted item, the rumour and the inside story were
developed.
• Williams (1998, 20) underlines that the most important
contribution made to mass communication was the develop-ment
of the ideal of freedom of expression and the press.
In 1644, John Milton published his pamphlet Areopagitica
in defence of the liberty of unlicensed printing:
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties”, wrote Milton.
The freedom of discussion that Milton defended was that between ‘serious
minded men who held honest, though differing opinions.’

9. Press freedom and the British press
• As Curran and Seaton (2010) point out, the winning of press freedom is
attributed to a heroic struggle against state oppression.
• Key events in this struggle include:
• 1) The abolition of the Court of Star Chamber in 1641
• 2) The ending of press licensing in 1694
• 3) Fox’s Libel Act, 1792
• 4) The repeal of press taxation –the ‘taxes on knowledge’ – in the period
1853-61
• The liberal argument states that it was only through the growth of
advertising did the press achieve independence.
• Curran and Seaton are critical of the argument that market development
contributed to its emancipation

10. The Rise and Fall of Censorship (16th to 17th century)
• 1. The licensing of the press/censorship
• The House of Tudor (1485-1603)
• Civil War (1642-1649)
• Oliver Cromwell’s military dictatorship (1653-1658)
• 2. Collapse of the Licensing Act: 3 May 1695
• 3. Manuscript news (newsletters) vs printed news (newssheets)

11. The Newspaper Boom (18th century)
• - The Daily Courant: 1702, London. England’s first daily
newspaper.
• - Lloyd’s List: 1734, London. Oldest newspaper published to
this day.
• - The Daily Universal Register: 1785, London, founded byJohn
Walter. It becomes The Times three years later.
• - The Observer: 1 December 1791

12. The Newspaper Boom (18th century) (in Curran and
Seaton, 2010)
• During the second half of the 18th century and in the early 19th century, a
section of the commercial press did become more politically independent as
a consequence of the growth of advertising.
• Advertising did not transform the commercial press into an independent
Fourth Estate.
• The development of modern political parties from the 1860s onwards
encouraged the connection between party politics and commercial
journalism.
• I.e. A number of leading proprietors in Victorian and Edwardian Britain
were members of Parliament, while some national papers were subsidized by
party funds until well into the 20th century.
•

13. The Age of the Coffee House (17th to 18th
century)

14. The Age of the Coffee House (17th to 18th
century)
• Why were they important?
• Within 20 years, coffee-houses had spread all over England.
• London’s first coffee house: Pasqua Rosee, 1652
• Men went to coffee houses to read the news and listen to gossip
• Habermas argued that the rise of capitalism in the 16th century created the
conditions for the development of the printing press and the emergence of an
elite public sphere of debate in the 18th and 19 centuries.
• Between the realm of public authority and the private realm of civil society,
a new public sphere, which consisted of private individuals who came
together to debate matters of public concern, emerged.
•

15. Coffee house

16. The Age of the Coffee House (17th to 18th
century)
• At the origins of the public sphere
• Jurgen Habermas
• Habermas claimed that the 18th century was a crucial period in the rise of
rational and critical argument, presented within a liberal bourgeoisie
‘public sphere’ which was in principle open to everyone’s participation
Coffee houses were debating places where men exchanged ideas and
opinions
• Habermas’ study underlines how the media are a system (including
newspapers, coffee-houses and salons) in which the different elements work
together

17. Habermas and the public sphere
• Habermas argued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(1962) that the development of capitalism in the 16th century created the
means for the emergence of a bourgeoisie public sphere, the main readers of
the newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries
• England in the 18th century had the conditions for the creation of this new
public sphere (Thompson, 1995)
• As Briggs and Burke (2002) pointed out, the book explains the structural
transformation of this sphere in the late 18th century in England and France,
its ‘non-instrumental’ (freedom from manipulation) and its contribution to
the rise of rational and critical attitudes to what would be known as the ‘old
regime’
• Criticisms to Habermas’ public sphere (i.e. an ‘utopian’ public sphere)

18. Habermas and the public sphere
“By ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all a domain of our social life in
which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the
public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public
sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons
come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business
or professional people conducting their private affairs….
…..Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general
interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that
they may assemble and unite….and express and publicise their opinions
freely. When the public is large, this kind of communication requires
certain means of dissemination and influence, today newspapers and
periodicals, radio and TV are the media of the public sphere…”
(Habermas, 1973)

19. The public sphere, democracy and the media
• * So what is the relationship between the media, the public sphere
and democracy?
• In the late 18th century, a new political class came to the fore in Britain
forming a public body which was in sharp contrast to the old
authorities (i.e. the state and the church), creating the conditions for a
rational public opinion. The creation of a network of institutions
within civil society provided the means through which private
thoughts could become public.
• It was since then that one learned to distinguish between opinion and
“public opinion” through the institutions of the mass media.
• Liberal model of the public sphere
• “The ground was cleared for this development from a press of
viewpoints to a commercial press at about the same time in England,
France and the US, during the 1830s.

20. The public sphere
• Trade unions State/Government/Political Establishment
Public Opinion
Political Parties
Business
Pressure
Groups
Public
Organizations
MediaMBleodgioaBTV
TV
debate
Citizens
Current
affairs
Editorials
News
Blogs
Features

21. The radical press of the 19th century (in Curran
and Seaton, 2010)
• The authorities came to rely on the newspaper stamp duty and
taxes on paper and advertisements as a way of curbing the radical
press
• The intention of the press taxes was twofold: to restrict the readership
of newspapers to the well-to-do by raising cover prices, and to limit the
ownership of newspapers to the proprietorial class by increasing
publishing costs.
• Successive governments sought to curb the radical press through
restrictive laws. Not always were they easy to enforce, and many
prosecutions were counter-productive
• I.e. When the editor of The Republican was prosecuted in 1819, the
paper’s circulation rose by over 50%.
•

22. The “Taxes on Knowledge”
• 1. Created by the Tory government of Queen Anne
in 1712
• 2. The Newspaper Stamp Duty
• 3. Consequences of the taxes:
• - Newspapers out of reach of the vast
majority
• - Growth of the press industry slowed down
• - Emergence of an illegal radical press

23. The radical press of the 19th century (in Curran
and Seaton, 2010)
• There was a belief that it was potentially dangerous to the social order to
allow the lower ranks to read newspapers at all.
• The stamp duty was increased by 266 per cent between 1789 and 1815.
• There was the evasion of stamp duty by an underground press (“the
unstamped press”)
• At least 1130 cases of selling unstamped newspapers were prosecuted in
London alone during the period 1830-36. Despite this, the radical press
continued to flourish.
• The government’s strategy had failed: by 1836 the unstamped press
published in London had an aggregate readership of at least two million.
• “If the radical journalism of the early 19th century was stifled, in its place was
taken by a reformist press that contributed to the building of the welfare
state.” (Curran and Seaton, 2010)

24. The radical press
• Radical press as a political force in the early 19th century –
did not obtain significant advertising support, yet they were
independent both of government and the opposition in
Parliament.
• The Industrial Revolution and class consciousness
• The two waves of the illegal radical press:
• Early 19th century:
• e.g. William Cobbett’s Political Register
• 1830s
• E.g. Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian

25. Impact of the industrial revolution and the radical
press
• The Industrial Revolution had a profound impact on the process of mass
communication
• As Williams (1998) and other authors point out, it accentuated the role of
mass communication in the economic life of the nation.
• It changed people’s relation in the workplace, in family life, and their sense
of belonging to a particular class
• The radical papers were said to have reached 20 readers per copy in the
1830s and 40s, being the circulation pace setter for the nation’s press
throughout much of the period 1815-55 period.
• After 1836, the radical press was not as strong in relation to the “respectable
press” as it had been before. (Curran and Seaton, 2012; Williams, 1998)

26. The radical press: The Poor Man’s
Guardian

27. Conclusions and questions for thought
• The development of the print media and of the newspaper industry ran
parallel to the emergence of a public sphere of debate in the 18th and 19th
centuries
• Newspapers had an important role in the emergence of public opinion
• Why were coffee houses important?
• Do you think that newspapers have the same influence in public debate
today, in defining the issues to discuss in the public sphere, that they had
then?
• Is there still room for a “radical press” or “partisan journalism”?
• Can we trace parallels between the arguments in favour of “freedom of the
press” (from state control) to the current debates and opposition to wider
regulation of the UK newspaper industry?

28. Readings for week 3
• Essential reading
• Curran, J. and J. Seaton (2010) Power Without Responsibility - 7th Edition.
Routledge. Routledge. Chapter 4.
•
• Highly recommended reading
• Briggs, A. and P. Burke (2002) A Social History of the Media: From
Gutenberg to the Internet. Polity. Chapter 5.
• Chalaby. J. (1998) The Invention of Journalism. Macmillan. Chapter 2.
• Additional reading
• Seymour-Ure, C. (1996) The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945.
Blackwell. Chapter 3.
• Tunstall, J. (1996) Newspaper Power. Oxford University Press. Part I, pp. 5
– 75.