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Making news the political economy of journalism in
Britain and America from the glorious revolution to the
Internet 1st Edition John Digital Instant Download
Author(s): John, Richard R.; Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan
ISBN(s): 9780199676187, 0199676186
Edition: 1st
File Details: PDF, 1.40 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
MAKING NEWS
 Making News
The Political Economy of Journalism
in Britain and America from the Glorious
Revolution to the Internet

Edited by
RICHARD R. JOHN AND
JONATHAN SILBERSTEIN-LOEB

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
# Oxford University Press 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a multiyear, multinational collaboration between a

group of scholars from three countries and two continents. Central to our
vision from the outset was the convening of face-to-face meetings at which the
contributors could present chapter drafts and refine their ideas. Two such
meetings occurred. The first took the form of a public conference at Columbia
University’s Heyman Center in November 2012 on “Free Market, Free Press?
The Political Economy of News Reporting in the Anglo-American World
since 1688”; the second, a day-long workshop at the University of Oxford’s
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in August 2013. Following these
two meetings, each of the chapters was extensively revised; this book is the
final result.
Projects of this kind would be impossible without generous financial assist-
ance. We are grateful for support from the Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism; the Poliak Fund at the Columbia School of Journalism; the
Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University; the Committee
on Global Thought at Columbia University; the Columbia University Society
of Fellows; and the Columbia University Seminars. Special thanks to Michele
Alacevich for his expert guidance in organizing the Columbia conference; to
Anya Schiffrin for her comradeship and collegiality, and for hosting a mem-
orable dinner party for our authors; and to Robert G. Picard and his staff for
coordinating our workshop at Oxford.
We are also grateful to the four journalism scholars who commented on
the papers that were presented at the Heyman Center Conference: Martin
Conboy, Brooke Kroeger, Michael Schudson, and Andie Tucher.
Among the many other people who have assisted us in various ways, we
would like to extend our special thanks to Nancy R. John, Emery A. John,
Larry Loeb, and Dr Linda Silberstein.
Richard R. John
Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
 Contents

List of Contributors ix

1. Making News 1
Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
2. The Rise of the Newspaper 19
Will Slauter
3. News in the Age of Revolution 47
Joseph M. Adelman and Victoria E. M. Gardner
4. The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper 73
David Paul Nord
5. International News in the Age of Empire 107
James R. Brennan
6. Broadcasting News in the Interwar Period 133
Michael Stamm
7. The Decline of Journalism since 1945 164
James L. Baughman
8. Protecting News before the Internet 196
Heidi J. S. Tworek
9. Protecting News Today 223
Robert G. Picard
Epilogue: Tomorrow’s News 238
Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb

Select Bibliography 245

Index 251
 List of Contributors

Joseph M. Adelman is Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State

University.
James L. Baughman is Fetzer Bascom Professor of Journalism and Mass
Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
James R. Brennan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
Victoria E. M. Gardner is a history teacher at Wellington College, Berkshire.
Richard R. John is Professor of History and Communications at Columbia
Journalism School, Columbia University.
David Paul Nord is Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Adjunct Professor
Emeritus of History at Indiana University.
Robert G. Picard is North American Representative at Reuters Institute,
University of Oxford, a research fellow at Green-Templeton College (Oxford),
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb was Senior Lecturer in History at Keble College,
Oxford. He is now a barrister of the Inner Temple.
Will Slauter is maître de conférences in English studies at Université Paris
Diderot (Paris 7) and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
Michael Stamm is Associate Professor in the Department of History and
School of Journalism at Michigan State University.
Heidi J. S. Tworek is Assistant Professor of International History at the
University of British Columbia.
 1

Making News
Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb

News reporting is expensive, yet information wants to be free. This unsettling

paradox has perplexed everyone who is interested in the future of high-quality
journalism. How can the news business be re-envisioned in a rapidly changing
world? Can market incentives and technological imperatives provide a way
forward? How important were the institutional arrangements that protected
the production and distribution of news in the past?
The history of the Anglo-American news business since the seventeenth
century provides one approach to these questions. From the 1770s until the
2000s, the dominant news medium in Britain and America was the newspaper,
by which we mean its print-and-paper incarnation and not its digital off-
spring. For over two centuries, the newspaper provided the people of both
countries with a steady supply of the time-specific reports on market trends
and public life that are commonly called news. The news that newspapers
contained has long been indispensable not only for commerce, the creation of
an informed citizenry, and the monitoring of the powers-that-be, but also for
the cultivation of the habits of civic engagement, the fundamental responsi-
bility, in the view of the moral philosopher John Dewey, of journalism in a
democratic society.
News, of course, can take a variety of forms and it would be a mistake to
presume that the newspaper has been the only medium for its circulation.
Though the newspaper was invented in the seventeenth century, it would take
over one hundred years for it to triumph over its rivals—the scribal newsletter,
the pamphlet, the broadside—to become the dominant news medium.1 In fact,
one of the most surprising facts about the rise of the newspaper is how halting
it has been.
Rival news providers never disappeared. From the 1770s until the 2000s,
newspaper publishers adapted to and, in turn, helped to shape a dazzling array
of technical contrivances that included low-cost mail delivery, the electric
telegraph, radio, and television. Yet the newspaper endured.
2 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
Following the Second World War, the newspaper increasingly found
itself in competition with television and radio. Even so, it has remained
a disproportionately important news source. Well into the twenty-first
century, according to one estimate, newspapers continued to generate
fully 85 percent of all the information that journalists, pundits, and media
commentators would regard as news.2 This is true, even though for several
decades the single most popular news medium in both Britain and America—
at least, in sheer weight of numbers—has not been not the newspaper, but
television news.3 Although the viewership of TV news has in recent years
outpaced newspaper readership, and despite the healthy profits long enjoyed
by television news divisions, television journalism has disproportionately
relied on reporting primarily intended for newspapers. In December 1968,
for example, two news agencies—the Associated Press (AP) and United
Press International (UPI)—originated 70 percent of all the domestic news
stories featured on NBC, then one of the nation’s two largest television
networks.4
Since the 2000s, however, a rising chorus of journalists and media scholars
in many countries—including Britain and America—have derided “dead-tree
media” as a doomed genre trapped in a death spiral from which it can never
recover.5 This is unsurprising: change is disruptive, and social commentators
make a living by crafting dramatic narratives with gloomy denouements.
The rhetoric of newspaper decline in the Anglo-American world is so
widespread that it has been little shaken by the fact that in countries as
otherwise different as Germany and India, the future of the print-and-paper
newspaper currently appears to be robust.6 Sooner or later, or so commenta-
tors assume, a combination of factors—including, above all, the commercial-
ization of the Internet—will doom the medium even in those markets in which
its financial position now seems secure.7
Making News is not yet another lament for a world we have lost. News is
distinct from and more important than newspapers, and the theme of Making
News is not the rise and fall of the print-and-paper newspaper, but the shifting
institutional arrangements that since the seventeenth century have protected
the production and distribution of news. These institutional arrangements
have taken many forms: advertising, sponsored content, cartels, administrative
regulations, government monopoly.
Our theme can be simply put: institutions matter.8 To understand how
news was made, neither markets nor technology but institutions hold the key.
By institutions we mean the relatively stable configuration of laws, adminis-
trative protocols, organizational templates, and cultural conventions that
facilitate or impede the production and distribution of news. Institutional
arrangements have been, on balance, more important than market incentives
and technological imperatives in creating and sustaining the organizational
capabilities necessary for high-quality journalism. High-quality journalism is
 Making News 3
built on independent reporting and independent reporting rests on a solid
base of financial support.
The problems confronting the news business involve the interplay of four
distinct elements: technological innovation, business strategy, professional
norms, and public policy. Making News explores the interplay of these four
elements in two countries over three hundred years. Interplay is the key.
Journalism has always been a challenging business to understand because it
is a “public good” in two distinct ways. Economists use the term “public good”
to characterize a product or service that is not depleted when it is consumed.
News is such a service. Once news is produced and distributed, it can be
endlessly circulated. For news providers to operate a sustainable business is
not easy; in fact, the very magnitude of the challenge helps explain why they
have so often created institutional arrangements to insulate themselves from
the market.
The term “public good” has a second meaning. For it also denotes a product
or service that is clothed in the public interest, in the sense that it is vital to the
civic life of a city, region, or nation. Public goods are magnets for intervention
by governments, political parties, and interest groups of all kinds. It is partly
for this reason that journalism is so preoccupied with ethical norms: high-
quality journalism is journalism that is infused with a public purpose.
This ever-shifting array of civic ideals, ethical norms, and institutional
arrangements—public, private, and in between—is what we call the political
economy of journalism. The political economy of journalism in the opening
decades of the twentieth century is rooted in decisions made long in the past.
To understand where we are going, it is useful to know where we have been.
Making News is a collection of original essays on the institutional arrange-
ments that news providers in Britain and America have relied on since the late
seventeenth century to facilitate the production and distribution of news. Our
purpose is neither elegiac nor encyclopedic. Rather, we have recruited a
distinguished team of specialists to analyze key junctures in the history of
the news business, with a focus on the big picture. Each essay is explicitly
comparative and each considers a relatively long time-span. While the essays
differ in emphasis and tone, each analyzes the institutional arrangements that
long sustained the dominant position of the newspaper as a news medium.
Some were legally binding, and, thus, overtly public; others were purely
customary and thus typically categorized as private. Whether public, private,
or something in between, these institutional arrangements established for
news providers the rules of the game.
Among the questions we have asked our authors to consider are: Who paid
for the news? What institutional arrangements facilitated its collection, cur-
ation, and circulation? How did these institutional arrangements interact with
technological imperatives and market incentives? How did they inform the
ideological commitments of journalists?
4 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
It is appropriate to focus on Britain and America for several reasons. First,
each country boasts a long history of independent newspaper-based reporting,
a journalistic genre that is critically dependent on the organizational capabil-
ities that only a well-staffed newsroom has been able to sustain; and, second,
the advertising revenue that newspaper publishers relied on in each of these
countries to staff these newsrooms is in steep decline. Our comparative
approach has the additional advantage of showing how the political economy
shaped the news business. Though British and American journalism have
much in common—each places a high value on independent reporting and
each has been highly commercialized since the seventeenth century—the rules
of the game for news providers in the two countries have often diverged.
A case in point is the contrasting institutional arrangements that British and
American news providers devised to facilitate the reporting of international
news. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, powerful news agencies—the
Press Association (PA) and Reuters in the United Kingdom and the New York
Associated Press (NYAP) and its successor the AP in the United States—long
coordinated international news cartels that lowered the cost of news for
many newspapers. In Britain, non-London newspapers obtained overseas
news at rock-bottom rates, thanks to the hefty cross-subsidies paid to the PA
by the London press, the colonial press, and certain colonial governments.
In the United States, in contrast, AP member newspapers obtained a steady
diet of time-specific news reports that the AP refused to distribute to rival
non-AP newspapers. Not until 1945 would the United States Supreme
Court finally ban the AP from limiting the circulation of its news reports
to member newspapers, overturning over a century of market-channeling
institutional arrangements that had been no less consequential for the news
business in the United States than the monopoly grant held by the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had been for the news business in the
United Kingdom.
Two dates serve as bookends for our project: 1688 and 1995. In 1688,
the English Parliament deposed James II in favor of William of Orange in
an event widely regarded as a critical juncture in British history. Known as the
“Glorious Revolution,” this event was a largely peaceful transfer of power that
ensured that the monarchy would remain Protestant and that the Crown’s
authority would be constrained by Parliament, which reaffirmed its preroga-
tive as the supreme power in the land. This event is mostly remembered for
shifting the balance of power towards Parliament and away from the Crown.
Yet it also had major consequences for the press. By enshrining religious
toleration as a civic ideal, Parliament delegitimized long-standing institutional
constraints on the circulation of information. Prior to 1688, every book,
pamphlet, or newspaper published in England had to be licensed by a
government censor prior to its publication. The Protestant succession and
Parliamentary supremacy cleared the way for the refusal by Parliament in
 Making News 5
1695 to renew legislation requiring the pre-publication licensing of printed
items, including newspapers. In so doing, Parliament helped birth a new
kind of public sphere that would hasten the rise of the newspaper as the
dominant medium for the circulation of news.9
To peg to a single year the beginnings of the rise of the newspaper over its
rivals as the dominant news medium is of course an oversimplification. The
newspaper would not become the dominant news medium until the 1770s.
Even so, there is good reason to credit the Glorious Revolution with enduring
consequences for journalism. Much the same can be said about 1995. Just as
the events of 1688 facilitated the rise of the newspaper as the dominant news
medium, so the events of 1995 accelerated its decline. For it was in that year
that the National Science Foundation in the United States permitted busi-
nesses to commercialize the digital computer network popularly known as the
Internet, hastening a remarkable proliferation of information on all manner of
topics, including news. Much of this information could be obtained free of
charge, undercutting the rationale for a newspaper subscription. No less
importantly, the Internet created a vast and rapidly growing online classified
advertising business that eroded the de facto spatial monopoly that news-
papers traditionally enjoyed over the placement of classified advertisements, a
major source of revenue for over two hundred years. Of course, splashy
display advertisements remain in the 2010s a stable revenue source for many
print-and-paper newspapers. Yet even here, it would seem likely that a sea
change from print to digital is well underway.
The decline of the print-and-paper newspaper predated the Internet. In
both Britain and America, per capita newspaper circulation had been drop-
ping for decades, partly due to shifting social norms, and partly due to the rise
of broadcast news. The Internet accelerated this downward trend, not only
because it provided audiences with a cheaper news source, but also because it
has emerged as a superior vehicle for classified advertisements.
The following seven chapters survey the shifting institutional arrangements
that facilitated the production and distribution of news in Britain and America
in the period between 1688 and 1995. An eighth chapter surveys the news
business following the commercialization of the Internet, and the epilogue
links past, present, and future.
While the chapters defy brief summary, four themes stand out. The first is the
pervasiveness in the news business of cross-subsidies; the second is the divergent
priorities of lawmakers in Britain and America; the third is the influence on
business strategy of political economy; and the fourth is the fallacy of what
English social historian E. P. Thompson called the “rationalist illusion,” that is,
the presumption that the elimination of constraints on the production and
distribution of news, such as, for example, the abolition of newspaper taxes in
nineteenth-century Britain, would more-or-less automatically create the neces-
sary preconditions for high-quality journalism.10
6 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
The pervasiveness of cross-subsidies in the news business is a theme that
unites almost every chapter in the volume, with the possible exception of the
chapter on the immediate post-Second World War era. To borrow from
the language of the economist: in the news business, oligopoly has been the
rule and competition the exception, and barriers to entry have been indispens-
able to the consistent production of high-quality journalism. Free trade in news
has always been a fiction. Collaboration and collusion ordinarily have been the
norm, and the freewheeling bottom-up creativity that many associate with
the Internet an aberration. High-quality news reporting is expensive and the
organizational capabilities necessary to sustain high-quality journalism require
a stable long-term investment that is difficult to monetize. To complicate
matters still further, with the exception of certain kinds of commercial infor-
mation, the demand for news has rarely generated enough revenue to cover its
cost. As a consequence, news providers have typically relied on subsidies of
various kinds to balance the books. On the production side, news cartels divided
the market; on the distribution side, advertisers subsidized reporting.
The pervasiveness of these cross-subsidies underscores the dependence of
news providers on some kind of commercial quid pro quo. Here it is import-
ant to make a basic distinction. Notwithstanding the challenges that Anglo-
American news providers have confronted in matching costs and revenue, the
news business has long been a commercial venture. Indeed, the presumption
that the news has been only recently commercialized—a tenet of much
historical writing on this topic in Britain and America, and a premise of a
celebrated philosophical treatise on the press by the German philosopher
Jürgen Habermas—has surprisingly little historical warrant.11 On the con-
trary, news has been a business since the seventeenth century, and commercial
considerations have shaped the business strategy of news providers for over
three hundred years.12 These commercial considerations, it is worth empha-
sizing, have typically had little relationship to the oft-touted emancipatory
potential for high-quality journalism of an unfettered marketplace of ideas.
Indeed, the very presumption that there has existed anything like an open
marketplace of ideas in the news business is hard to square with the evidence.
Every kind of news—including, in particular, financial news—has been long
subject to subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation by self-interested parties:
sponsored content is nothing new.13 A very different kind of manipulation
shaped the distribution of news: beginning in the nineteenth century, news
providers routinely colluded with news agencies—and, in the late nineteenth-
century United States, network providers—to limit access to news reports.14 In
addition, and perhaps most important of all, high-quality journalism has
flourished best in organizations that proved the most successful at keeping
market forces at bay.
To be sure, Anglo-American journalism has only rarely sanctioned direct
state control. With the notable exceptions of the BBC in the United Kingdom
 Making News 7
and National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
in the United States, the news business in both countries has primarily
devolved on for-profit commercial ventures that are largely, though not
exclusively, independent of the state. Even so, the news business in Britain
and America has been protected from market competition by a variety of
institutional arrangements. Each had the effect, as was often its intention, of
protecting incumbents from new entrants. In the news business, protection
is a form of subsidy, competition between news providers is often contrived,
and the cost of supplying the news has often exceeded the demand for its
provision.
The financial precariousness of the news business is worth emphasizing,
given the propensity of twenty-first-century media analysts to regard the half-
century that followed the end of Second World War in 1945 as the baseline for
future-oriented projections. Few assumptions have done more to obfuscate the
challenging question of how it will remain possible to sustain high-quality
independent journalism, including, in particular, investigative reporting.15 In
fact, if one takes the long view, the one period during which news providers
consistently generated impressive profits—that is, the five post-Second-
World-War decades—was the least typical. A more appropriate baseline for
the future might be the United States in the early republic, a period in which
public policy hastened the oversupply of news, an outcome that, as many
contemporary chroniclers observed, limited its influence and undercut its
authority.
A second theme that runs through the chapters in this volume is the
divergent priorities of lawmakers in Britain and America. Media scholars
interested in comparative media systems often lump together Britain and
America as exemplars of a single, market-oriented liberal model.16 This is
true even for those scholars who are attuned to the sometimes subtle but by no
means insignificant differences in the legal standing of journalism in British
and American law.17 The chapters in this volume, in contrast, show how the
political economy of journalism in Britain and America shaped the business
strategy of news providers. By considering the political economy as an agent of
change, rather than merely as the aggregation of specific political decisions, the
contributors demonstrate that British lawmakers have been consistently more
willing to support centralized news providers than lawmakers in the United
States. As a consequence, the news business in the United States has been more
variegated and, especially early on, more financially precarious.
In explaining the evolution of the news business in Britain and America, our
contributors have not focused exclusively on political factors. On the contrary,
and in the best tradition of historical writing on economic institutions, they
have probed the interrelationship of politics, technology, the economy, and
ideology. Even so, in both Britain and America the structuring presence of the
state has loomed large. For example, even ostensibly non-political decisions,
8 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
such as the acquiescence of lawmakers in cartel agreements that contempor-
aries regarded as private, presupposed a raft of assumptions about the rela-
tionship of government and the press that had major implications for the
provisioning of news.
A third theme that unites the chapters in this volume is the relationship
between political economy and business strategy. The business strategy of
news providers has been shaped not only or even primarily by the supposedly
unstoppable juggernaut of market incentives and technological imperatives,
but also by the structuring presence of governmental institutions and civic
ideals. The political economy has shaped the business strategy of news pro-
viders by encouraging certain business practices and discouraging others.
Particularly important has been the implicit political endorsement of the
distinctive, yet complementary, cartel agreements that have strengthened
the organizational capabilities of news agencies in the United Kingdom and
the United States: the PA and Reuters in the United Kingdom; the NYAP and its
successor, the AP, in the United States.
The influence of civic ideals on the business strategy of news providers
has informed the journalistic output of reform-minded editors in Britain,
America, and Britain’s colonial possessions. For the nineteenth-century liberals
C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian and Joseph Medill of the Chicago
Tribune, urban politics fostered new forms of civic engagement. For Mahatma
Gandhi, British imperialism emboldened a twentieth-century anti-colonial
journalist to popularize an innovative form of nonviolent popular protest.18
A final theme that ties these chapters together is the fallaciousness of the
common presumption that government policies designed to facilitate access to
information will automatically generate useful knowledge. This presumption
helped inspire the successful popular protest in Britain during the 1830s
against the taxes that the government levied on newspapers; it would recur
in the 1860s during the public debate that culminated in the government
purchase of the electric telegraph. This presumption has re-emerged among
proponents of “net neutrality,” a principle that is sometimes invoked as a cure-
all for almost everything critics find objectionable about the current digital
media environment. Taken together, the chapters in this volume raise ques-
tions about this presumption. If newsgathering has almost always been
collaborative—and, indeed, often monopolistic—then it would seem to be
more constructive for lawmakers to encourage journalistic cooperation than
to assume, in flat contradiction of the historical record, that a swarm of nimble
digital start-ups can supersede the lumbering journalistic behemoths of
the past.
The presumption that the news business can flourish in a marketplace of
ideas has long been a civic ideal. In practice, however, the emergence begin-
ning in 1995 of what can be plausibly characterized as a genuinely competitive
marketplace for the production and distribution of news has limited the
 Making News 9
resources for high-quality news reporting. Much would be gained, and little
lost, if we abandoned the marketplace of ideas metaphor and replaced it with
an alternative, such as public utility, civic engagement, or even the creation of
an informed citizenry. For the production of high-quality journalism is a
byproduct less of the market than of the acquiescence of lawmakers in the
market-channeling business strategies that have transformed journalism in
the past, and will in all likelihood transform it once again in the future.
The rise of the newspaper in the period between 1688 and the start of the
American War of Independence in 1775 is the topic of Will Slauter’s chapter
on the early modern news business. Like so many innovations in the history of
Anglo-American journalism, this development received a major impetus from
institutional arrangements that had little to do with market demand. Printers
benefited from tax loopholes, the awarding of special privileges by government
officials, and the lapse of pre-publication censorship in 1695. Even after 1695,
printers who circulated information on sensitive topics remained vulnerable to
arrest and imprisonment, but they could no longer be blocked in advance
from publishing information on market trends and public affairs.
For a time, it was unclear if newspapers would win out in the multimedia
contest with pamphlets, magazines, broadsides, and scribal newsletters. Few
barriers to entry existed—in contrast to, say, the nineteenth century, when the
widespread adoption of the steam press greatly increased the capital costs of
publishing a newspaper. Even so, newspapers had a critical advantage that
other media lacked: they offered advertisers a tool to reach a large and varied
audience quickly and cheaply. Advertisements, crowed one printer in 1769,
were the “Life of a Paper.” Not surprisingly, advertisers—including, for example,
London theater owners, eager to fill their seats—invested heavily in newspapers,
helping to ensure that they would prosper. Right from the start, printers sold
not only news, but also the attention of a captive audience for advertisers, and, to
an extent that is often forgotten, it was the captive audience and not the news
that paid the bills.
The political economy for journalism that Slauter describes differed in
several respects from the political economy of the more recent past. The
most obvious contrast was the limited investment in reporting. The financial
resources that printers allocated for newsgathering went not to reporters, an
occupational category that had yet to exist, but to the procurement of other
publications, which printers mined for suitable material. Eventually, this task
would devolve on a specialist known as the “editor,” an occupational title that
in Britain had come into use by the 1760s. Most contributors, who were known
as letter writers or “correspondents,” were unpaid, and it was not at all
uncommon for government insiders to pay the newspaper to insert a paragraph
surreptitiously to influence public opinion on one of the public issues of the
day. In the absence of the unpaid labor of the letter-writers, the extensive
participation by readers in newsgathering, and the ubiquitous sharing of news
10 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
items between newspapers—features of the eighteenth-century press that in
some ways mimic digital media conventions—it would have been hard to
envision the newspaper emerging as the dominant news medium in the
Anglo-American world.
Among the proudest legacies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was
the opening to journalists of the ongoing deliberations of the national legisla-
ture: Parliament in Britain; Congress in America. Few developments did more
to facilitate the systematic, ongoing coverage of public affairs. In Britain, this
innovation occurred in the 1770s, when, following a political struggle, jour-
nalists got access to Parliament; in the United States, it occurred in a six-year
period between 1789 and 1795. In 1789, journalists obtained access to the
House of Representatives, in keeping with what lawmakers assumed to be the
protocols appropriate to a government established by a popular mandate under
the federal Constitution; six years later, they also got access to the Senate. The
results of this innovation were subtle, yet profound. In Britain, the opening of
Parliament to journalists helped to spur a reorientation in the coverage of
public affairs away from international relations and back again toward national
politics. In the United States, it focused the press on the national government, a
circumstance that, given the decentralized, federal structure of the American
polity, was by no means preordained.
The opening of the national legislature to journalists coincided with the
expansion of the newspaper during the “Age of Revolution,” an epoch that
began with the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775
and ended with the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In both Britain and
America—as Joseph Adelman and Victoria Gardner contend in their chapter
on the news business in this period—it now became not only possible, but also
obligatory, for journalists to report extensively on national public affairs. To
meet this demand for up-to-date information, news providers in each country
invented a new vocation: the stenographic reporter. In Britain, Parliamentary
reporters remained subordinate to the authors of the anonymous “para-
graphs” that printers inserted into newspapers. In the United States, in
contrast, a small number of journalists—led by Joseph Gales, Jr, the son of a
radical printer from Sheffield, England, who had fled from Britain to the
United States—became influential for transcribing and then printing the
debates of Congress, a role that Gales himself performed with distinction for
many years.
While the opening of the national legislature highlighted commonalities
between British and American public policy, other legislative initiatives
pushed journalism in different directions. In Britain, press freedom was rooted
in privilege. To limit the circulation of subversive ideas, early nineteenth-
century lawmakers charged a heavy tax on newsprint and newspaper advert-
isements, increasing production costs. Advertising remained vitally important,
since subscriptions barely covered the tax-augmented production costs. Yet
 Making News 11
the impact of these taxes affected different journalists in different ways.
Insurgents confronted prohibitively high barriers to entry while incumbents
thrived. Among the winners was the well-established London-based Times,
which took advantage of its privileged position to assert its political independ-
ence from the powers-that-be, encouraging the ascendancy of the editor over
the printer within the journalistic craft, and buttressing the emerging concep-
tion of the newspaper press as a semi-autonomous “fourth estate.”
In the United States, in contrast, the political economy of journalism
hastened a flood of newspapers that was without parallel in world history.
Here press freedom rested not in privilege, but in opportunity. Paradoxically,
however, opportunity only rarely translated into commercial success. In
America, as in Britain, advertising revenue remained important for the pub-
lishers’ bottom line. Yet for many news providers, advertising and subscrip-
tions were not enough. Political subventions, mostly in the form of
government printing contracts and government advertising, provided many
news providers with the additional revenue they needed to stay afloat.
The remarkable proliferation of newspapers in the United States during the
early republic owed much to public policy. Most obvious was the absence of
the onerous newspaper taxes that had limited the circulation of newspapers in
Britain. Even more important was the Post Office Act of 1792, which lavishly
subsidized the newspaper press.
The Post Office Act of 1792 is much less well known than the First
Amendment to the federal Constitution, with its stirring paean to the freedom
of the press. Yet for well over a century, the Post Office Act had a much more
immediate and enduring influence on the news business. The First Amend-
ment would only become important for the press when it became invoked in
constitutional jurisprudence. And this took a surprisingly long time: the
United States Supreme Court would not hear its first First Amendment case
until the First World War, and it would not be until the 1960s that the
judiciary invested the freedom of the press with the quasi-superstitious aura
that has enshrouded it ever since. The Post Office Act of 1792, in contrast,
exerted a pervasive influence on the press from the moment of its enactment.
Three provisions of the Post Office Act proved to be especially indispens-
able for news providers. First, Congress admitted every newspaper printed in
the country into the mail at extremely low rates, a policy that was at this time
unprecedented anywhere else in the world; second, it permitted printers to
send an unlimited number of newspapers through the mail to other printers
without any charge whatsoever, massively subsidizing news distribution; and,
third, it instituted a mechanism to facilitate the rapid expansion of the postal
network that led inexorably to the enormous proliferation of postal routes
throughout the vast American hinterland.19 Just as the Internet is rapidly
emerging as an indispensable platform for commerce and public life, so the
postal network became in Alexis de Tocqueville’s America the operating
12 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
system for the world’s first mass democracy, a world in which the small-town
post office supplanted the big-city coffee house as the iconic communications
node of the age.20
The modern daily newspaper was born in the 1870s in the burgeoning
industrial cities of Britain and America. This is the provocative claim of David
Paul Nord’s chapter on the news business in the Victorian city. Newspapers in
Chicago, St. Louis, and Manchester, England, popularized a new, distinctively
urban style of journalism, rooted in the civic ideals of the Enlightenment, that
linked the big-city newspaper with the prosperity of the cities in which they
were published. The political economy of the industrial city became the
journalists’ “beat.” Buttressed by stable subscription lists and healthy adver-
tising revenues, these newspapers exemplified the “new journalism” that the
English cultural critic Matthew Arnold decried. At their core, these news-
papers were defined not by the philistine superficiality that Arnold deplored,
but by their dual role as commercial enterprises and civic boosters. Early on,
the Chicago Tribune and its English cousin, the Manchester Guardian, cham-
pioned the highly individualistic, anti-interventionist economic liberalism
known in Britain as laissez faire and in America as antimonopoly. Over
time, however, even some of the most ardent champions of private enterprise
and economic liberalism came to embrace a much more collectivistic under-
standing of political economy. This new sensibility, rooted in the commercial
realities of the industrial city, would prove even more consequential for the
press than the two journalistic innovations (both American) to emerge in the
same period: the first-person interview and the investigative exposé. Labeled
by contemporaries the “New Liberalism” in Britain and “progressivism” in
America, this city-centric reform agenda would shape the public debate on the
government regulation of big business in the two decades preceding the First
World War. To solve the problems of the day, journalists combined a faith in
discussion, negotiation, and the rational arbitration of conflict with an almost
irrational faith in the efficacy of facts. Of every three stories on public affairs to
appear in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1894–5, one was on municipal utilities:
for the first time in history, news reporting had come to focus on infrastruc-
tural improvements in a specific locality.
The newspapers that Nord describes were both politically influential and
commercially successful. Yet their newsgathering apparatus remained
restricted primarily to the locality in which they were published. How, then,
did journalists gather news on events that originated at a distance? This
question furnishes the theme for James R. Brennan’s chapter on the business
of international news in the half-century before the First World War. The
“Age of Empire,” as this period has come to be known, witnessed the heyday of
imperial expansion for the United Kingdom and the first major overseas war
for the United States. The international news that found its way into the leading
mass-circulation newspapers—Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail in London;
 Making News 13
Joseph Pulitzer’s World in New York—was often generated by a new
institution—the international news agency—that took advantage of the
novel facilities for high-speed communications that had been created by
the electric telegraph, a new medium that by the 1890s linked the world in
a single global network. In Britain and America the most important of
these news agencies—the PA and Reuters in Britain; the NYAP and its
twentieth-century successor, the AP, in the United States—relied on distinct
yet complementary business strategies to provide newspaper readers with
international news.
The quality of the news that these news agencies provided was highly
uneven. Newspaper coverage of the Boer War in Britain and the Spanish–
American War in the United States was notoriously bigoted and unfair. Yet in
no obvious sense was it market-driven. Rather, it was the logical byproduct of
the institutional arrangements that newspaper publishers devised to supersede
the exigencies of the market.
Then, as now, news agencies were bedeviled by a conundrum. How would
they be remunerated for gathering a commodity—news—that lost its com-
mercial value the instant it was made public? Information of enormous value
to readers could not be monetized once it had found its way into print. To
make matters even more complicated, at no point did the demand for inter-
national news match the cost of its supply. In the period between 1869 and
1915, Reuters’s news business generated less than 2 percent of the company’s
total profits. To generate the revenue necessary to cover international news,
Reuters and the PA relied on government subventions, cross-subsidies from the
London and colonial press and other lines of business, and cartel agreements
with their principal rivals (Wolff in Germany; Havas in France). The NYAP and
the AP adopted a different strategy. By limiting their dispatches to member
newspapers, they created a tradable asset—exclusivity—that justified the fees
they charged for access to their newsfeed.21
In the twentieth century, the newspaper would be challenged but not
overtaken as a vehicle for news reporting by broadcasting—first radio, and
eventually television. Radio news, as Michael Stamm demonstrates in his
chapter on the news business in the period between the first commercial
radio broadcasts in 1920 and the Second World War, augmented but did
not supplant news reporting by newspapers.
The boundaries between news broadcasting and newspaper news owed
much to the institutional arrangements that lawmakers devised. These insti-
tutional arrangements had certain common features: in both Britain and
America, lawmakers claimed as a government monopoly the electromagnetic
spectrum. In neither country was it possible for a business or individual to
own a radio frequency, and every radio station had to obtain a license. The
regulatory differences, however, were equally marked. In Britain, Parliament
also established a monopoly over radio licences, which was coordinated by the
14 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
BBC. In the United States, in contrast, Congress opposed a government broad-
casting monopoly, and, as an alternative, empowered a regulatory agency to
grant broadcasting licenses to as many stations as the agency presumed to be
technically feasible.
Once again, in yet another variation on a pattern that went back to the
Enlightenment, British lawmaking fostered centralization and American law-
making decentralization. The outcomes for journalism, however, were quite
different. In late eighteenth-century Britain, centralization encouraged news
reporting; in the 1920s, however, it did not. Fearful that the BBC would
compete with their own news reporting, British newspaper publishers suc-
cessfully blocked it from entering the news business. Ironically, the establish-
ment by Parliament of a monopoly radio broadcaster had led British
newspaper publishers to persuade lawmakers to strengthen their monopoly
over the news business. The limitations on radio broadcasting were made
evident in one notorious instance in 1926, when, to mollify British newspaper
publishers, the BBC broadcast the sounds of the horses’ hooves beating against
the track during the Epsom Derby, but not the result of the race. For many
years thereafter, newspaper publishers would successfully limit the character
and scale of the news reporting that the BBC could undertake. These restraints
were not lifted until the Second World War, when the vivid BBC radio
broadcasts of journalists such as Richard Dimbleby convinced British law-
makers that it was politically necessary for the public to listen in real time to
the sounds of the war on the radio as well as to read about the war in the
newspaper and to see it at the movies, in the short features known as
newsreels.
In the United States, in contrast, lawmakers refrained from imposing any
limitations on the kinds of news that radio announcers could report.22 Yet this
did not mean that the news business evolved in the absence of legal constraint
or the intervention of newspaper publishers. In Britain, radio broadcasting
was a government-licensed monopoly. In the United States, newspaper pub-
lishers quickly came to hold licenses for a substantial percentage of radio
stations. Predictably, newspaper publishers were eager to exploit the commer-
cial potential of the new medium, and American radio stations were much
more aggressive than the BBC in broadcasting news reports and covering live
events. CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow was but the most accomplished of a
generation of talented American on-air news journalists to emerge at this time.
The influence of public policy on the news business was far less obtrusive in
the half-century between 1945 and 1995, according to James L. Baughman in
his chapter on this period. Yet it was never entirely absent. In both countries,
this half-century witnessed the deregulation of broadcast news, a development
that would fill the coffers of news moguls while weakening the organizational
capabilities of the major news networks. In Britain, the BBC lost its TV
broadcasting monopoly in 1954 and its radio broadcasting monopoly in
 Making News 15
1971; in the United States, the “Fairness Doctrine”—which, by obliging radio
and television broadcasters to air multiple viewpoints, had the unintended
effect of limiting the range of opinions that they felt it prudent to express—was
eliminated in 1987.
The deregulation of the news business helped explain why it had become so
lucrative. On both sides of the Atlantic, media mogul Rupert Murdoch became
a household name while television broadcasters and newspaper publishers
reaped huge profits. This was not the first epoch in which the news business
had been highly lucrative. A century earlier, Pulitzer and Harmsworth had
made good money running big-city newspapers. Yet the post-Second World
War profits spurred by the steady upsurge in advertising revenue was unpre-
cedented, and, in certain respects, misleading. As the number of newspapers in
a particular city dwindled, the advertising revenue increased substantially for
those that remained, leading to a temporary burst of innovative news report-
ing. Only after the commercialization of the Internet in 1995 did the financial
prospects of the surviving newspapers significantly decline, leading to further
cuts in newsroom staffs and overseas reporting. In this context, it is worth
recalling just how recent all this is: the peak year for newspaper advertising
revenue in the United States was 2005.23
The legal strategies news providers deployed to protect the commercial
value of news reporting is the theme of the final two chapters, by Heidi
J. S. Tworek and Robert G. Picard. Each focuses on a different period: Tworek
on the post-electric telegraph, pre-1995 past; Picard on the post-Internet
present. Among the themes that they explore is the relative merit of licensing
versus copyright as legal strategies and the peculiar challenges that news
providers confront in their determination to protect their news stories from
unauthorized use. In the pre-1995 period, news providers relied on the
exclusivity of their newsfeeds to protect their organizational capabilities, a
business strategy that received a major impetus following the rise of the
modern metropolitan newspaper in the 1870s. As print runs became larger
and the news business more capital-intensive—a shift that had been spurred in
part by the widespread adoption of technical contrivances such as mechanical
typesetting and the high-speed steam-powered printing press—news agencies
in Britain and America devised exclusionary business strategies that enabled
news publishers to block their rivals from gaining access to time-specific
information. Since 1995, in contrast, the commercialization of the Internet
has made it more difficult to perpetuate the exclusionary business strategies
that served news providers so well in the past.
News providers have always looked to legal institutions to protect them-
selves from competition, Tworek observes. Yet certain strategies have been
more successful than others. In the interwar period, for example, the British
news agency Reuters and its American rival the AP each lobbied international
standard-setting organizations to transform news reports into a form of
16 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
property that governmental institutions would protect. In the end, however,
this legal strategy came to naught. Far more successful was the adoption by
news providers of a cartel-based business strategy that was closely aligned with
the political economy of the countries in which they were based.
The limitations of copyright as a panacea for the problems facing twenty-
first-century news providers is emphasized by Picard in his chapter on the
news business since 1995. News providers intent on protecting their intellec-
tual assets would be well advised, in his view, to scale back on their efforts to
make copyright a trump, and focus attention instead on the establishment of
licensing agreements similar to those that had worked so well for news
providers in the past.
A second theme that Picard explores is the decline of the print-and-paper
newspaper. Recent events, including, but by no means confined to, the com-
mercialization of the Internet, are bringing to a close an epoch in the history of
news that goes back to the Enlightenment. There are simply too many news
providers and too few barriers to entry for incumbent news providers to retain
their privileged position. As a consequence, the badly frayed lifeline between
the production of news and the publication of newspapers has finally snapped.
The future remains open. It is hard to know how lawmakers will respond,
should digital aggregators carve out for themselves a dominant position in the
news distribution business and Internet service providers occupy the same
functional niche in the political economy once filled by telecommunications
giants such as the Bell System. Even so, it seems safe to predict that the
audience for print-and-paper newspapers will continue to decline, and that
digital media, including mobile devices, will become increasingly ubiquitous.
It also seems likely that in the future the news business will focus less on the
news flash and more on specialized reporting, and that news providers will
monitor ever more systematically their audience and its engagement. The
most trusted, enterprising, and ambitious of these news providers will almost
certainly be relatively large, and perhaps even oligopolistic.
While the future remains open, much can be learned from the past. The
chapters that follow have been written with this goal in mind.

NOTES
1. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about
Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
2. Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4. See also Peter Preston, “Without
Print Newsgathering, Fighting over Media Plurality Is Academic,” The Guardian,
July 8, 2012, <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jul/08/media-plurality-
news-gathering-peter-preston>.
 Making News 17
3. James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and
Broadcasting in America since 1941, 3rd edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006), 160; Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News, 2nd edn (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 228–9; see also data from Pew Research Center, “In
Changing News Landscape, Even Television is Vulnerable,” September 27, 2012,
<http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-
television-is-vulnerable/>.
4. Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (Chicago:
I. R. Dee, 2000 [1973]), 142.
5. In keeping with popular convention, we often refer to the United Kingdom as
Britain and the United States as America. This convention is not without prob-
lems. Yet it has the advantage of brevity, and avoids the thorny issues raised by
shifts in political nomenclature. The United States would remain part of British
North America until 1776, while Great Britain would not become the United
Kingdom until 1801.
6. David A. L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielson, The Changing Business of Journalism
and its Implications for Democracy (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism, 2010); Ken Auletta, “Citizens Jain,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2012.
7. For a sampling of commentary on the so-called “critical juncture” in journalism
that has been hastened by the rise of the Internet, see Robert W. McChensey and
Victor Picard (eds), Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse
of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It (New York: New Press, 2011).
8. Richard R. John, “Why Institutions Matter,” Common-place, 9/1 (October 2008),
<http://www.common-place.org/vol-09/no-01/john/>.
9. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), ch. 15.
10. On the rationalist illusion, see Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, The International Dis-
tribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1957
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 4, esp. 92. See also Patricia
Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Journalism (London: Oxford
University Press, 1970).
11. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1989 [1962]).
12. For a related discussion, see James L. Baughman, “The Reconsideration of Ameri-
can Journalism History,” conference paper, American Historical Association,
Chicago, January 2012.
13. Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 4.
14. John, Network Nation, ch. 5.
15. For a parallel argument, see George Brock, Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism,
and the Business of News in the Digital Age (London: Kogan Page, 2013), chs 3–4.
16. Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of
Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
17. See, for example, Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern
Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), chs 1–2.
18 Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
18. Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
19. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin
to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chs 1–2.
20. Richard R. John and Thomas C. Leonard, “The Illusions of the Ordinary: John
Lewis Krimmel’s Village Tavern and the Democratization of Public Life in the
Early Republic,” Pennsylvania History, 65 (Winter 1998): 87–96.
21. Silberstein-Loeb, International Distribution of News, chs 2–3.
22. While the United States government imposed no limitations on radio broadcast-
ing, the AP did. Intent on preserving a level playing field between newspapers that
did and did not own their own radio stations, the AP significantly limited the uses
to which its members could put its newsfeed. Silberstein-Loeb, International
Distribution of News, 75–6.
23. “Annual Newspaper Ad Revenue,” in Newspaper Association of America, News-
paper Revenue, <http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers/Newspaper-Revenue.
aspx>.
 2

The Rise of the Newspaper

Will Slauter

In the late seventeenth century, most news—defined as timely reports on

public affairs and commerce—did not appear in newspapers. The monarchy,
church, and Parliament closely monitored discussions of politics and religion.
In most years, the official London Gazette (1666–present) remained the only
printed newspaper. A tiny elite paid for access to fuller reports found in
handwritten newsletters, which were compiled in London by individuals
with access to the diplomatic correspondence of the monarchy and free use
of the royal post. Merchants also relied on weekly periodicals called price
currents for updates on the prices of goods in various markets. But when it
came to distributing news in print, periodicals were not as common as separate
pamphlets, which could be produced quickly and sold cheaply on the streets,
and broadsides, which contained words and images printed on one side of a
sheet so that they could be attached to a wall or post for public viewing.
By the late eighteenth century, the business and culture of news had
changed substantially. Admittedly, local news still traveled by word of
mouth, friends in other places still provided details that could not be found
in print, and pamphlets remained important tools of political persuasion. But
by 1775 newspapers printed on a regular schedule (weekly, tri-weekly, or
daily) could be found in cities throughout England and North America, not
to mention Scotland, Ireland, and the West Indies. These newspapers dis-
cussed public affairs more openly than their seventeenth-century counter-
parts, and they contained a range of material that previously appeared in
distinct publications: paragraphs of foreign and domestic news, price lists and
mortality figures, accounts of crimes and trials, poems and songs, reader
correspondence, parliamentary proceedings, political essays, and advertise-
ments. Pamphlets and broadsides continued to be used for late-breaking news
or for certain genres, such as the last words of executed criminals. But by 1775
the newspaper had become the primary means of packaging news and selling
it to customers.
20 Will Slauter
From the perspective of printers and publishers, periodicals sold by sub-
scription had several advantages over separate publications such as pamphlets
and broadsides: a predictable production schedule, dedicated customers in
known locations, and the promise (though not the guarantee) of steady
income from sales and advertisements. Periodicity—the fact of issuing a
publication on a regular schedule—encouraged the formation of a community
of readers, which in turn attracted advertisers. Selling by subscription locked
customers in and enabled printers to know how many copies to print and
where to deliver them. Newspapers in the late eighteenth century contained
much more than news, and their mix of literary, political, and commercial
material increased their appeal for readers.
Still, it was not inevitable that the newspaper would become the dominant
way of selling news by 1775. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries con-
stituted a period of experimentation in the form and content of publications
and in their means of distribution. Writers, printers, and distributors of news
adapted to changes in government regulations related to censorship, taxation,
and postal distribution, but their actions also pushed these policies in unfore-
seen directions. To make the newspaper work as a viable medium, individuals
exploited loopholes in tax policy, negotiated deals with postal officials (or
became postmasters), diversified their businesses, and developed relationships
that enabled them to collect news and distribute it to customers.

THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF NEWS IN AN AGE

OF CENSORSHIP AND MONOPOLY

To better understand developments after 1688, the first part of this chapter
provides an overview of the commercialization of news and the development
of periodicity in the early to mid-seventeenth century. Specialists of that
period have pointed out that periodicals are artificial because events of public
concern do not necessarily occur on a predictable schedule. Adherence to a
weekly (and later daily) schedule created the obligation to fill every issue
regardless of whether there was anything new to publish. Accounts received
after an issue had gone to press either had to be held until the following week
or prepared for sale in some other form, such as a broadside or pamphlet.1
A variety of broadsides existed in the seventeenth century, from proclama-
tions issued by authority and funeral elegies commissioned by friends of the
deceased to satirical poems and ballads, some of which narrated recent events.
Ballad writers visited public places in search of topical material that they could
put to verse, but rather than providing a straightforward narrative of an event
(such as a fire, an execution, or a battle), they tended to exploit the event to
 The Rise of the Newspaper 21
teach a moral lesson. Ballads and other broadsides could be purchased for
about a penny from booksellers, peddlers, or hawkers.2 Accounts of battles,
treaties, crimes, and natural disasters also appeared in pamphlets, which could
be produced quickly and sold on the street. The number of pamphlets tended
to increase during periods of war, such as during the late 1580s, when England
was at war with Spain.3
In contrast to broadsides and pamphlets, periodicals required a regular
supply of news (to fill each issue) and a systematic means of distributing the
final product to customers. Both of these tasks would be greatly facilitated by
the development of more extensive and reliable postal routes during the
seventeenth century. After 1600, improvements in the royal posts and private
courier services across Europe enabled merchants, bankers, diplomats, and
others to expect weekly updates from their correspondents in other cities.4
Regular mail delivery also made it possible for well-connected individuals to
issue weekly newsletters to paying subscribers. The newsletters were written
rather than printed because they catered to an elite clientele who paid hand-
somely for access to information that many rulers did not wish to see circulated.
But the newsletters were only able to exist in the first place because diplomats
and spies leaked information to the compilers, who provided them with other
information in return. The compilers recorded news and rumors picked up
locally, combined them with reports received from other cities, and mailed the
aggregate product to their elite clients. In major trading centers like Venice and
Antwerp, some of the news compilers had offices where clerks made copies for
local and foreign subscribers; others worked alone with limited means and
changed locations to avoid trouble with the authorities. But by around 1620
they could be found in all the courts and trading centers of Europe.5
These handwritten newsletters were the basis for the first printed news
periodicals. As early as 1605, Johann Carolus of Strasbourg, who already had a
business copying incoming newsletters and selling them to local customers,
produced a printed version for a wider audience.6 Printers in other cities soon
imitated Carolus, but the main growth spurt came with the Thirty Years’
War (1618–48), which generated demand for military news across Europe.
These early printed periodicals were often called “corantos” because they
provided a “current” of news from various parts of Europe (the first recorded
use of the word “newspaper” was not until 1667, and the term was not
commonly used before the eighteenth century).7 The corantos adopted the
basic form of the written newsletters (short bulletins arranged by the geo-
graphic origin of the news rather than its subject) and they copied many of
their reports from the newsletters, which continued to circulate. The first
corantos produced in England date to 1621. They were the work of a small
group of London printers and booksellers who translated Dutch corantos
and printed them for local customers. There is no reliable evidence about
circulation, but the print runs were probably in the low hundreds.8
22 Will Slauter
The decision to print corantos was risky because English monarchs
claimed a prerogative over all affairs of state and discouraged discussion of
domestic or foreign policy. In 1620 James I reacted to publications about the
European conflict by ordering his subjects “from the highest to the lowest to
take heede, how they intermeddle by Penne, or Speech, with causes of State
and secrets of Empire, either at home, or abroad.”9 He also persuaded the
United Provinces to prohibit the exportation of printed corantos to England.
These measures proved ineffective in stopping the flow of news, so the king
appointed a licenser to authorize weekly publications by a few select mem-
bers of the Stationers’ Company (the London guild of printers and booksell-
ers). The stationers agreed to avoid discussion of English affairs and to limit
themselves to translations of what had been printed on the continent. But
Charles I (who became king in 1625) did not appreciate open discussion of
foreign affairs either, and after a complaint by the Spanish ambassador about
one of the corantos in 1632 the monarch banned them entirely. In 1638 two
of the main publishers of news—Nicholas Bourne and Nathaniel Butter—
obtained a royal license with the exclusive right to publish translations of
foreign corantos. This privilege was meant to limit the production of news to
a couple of individuals who promised to avoid printing anything against the
monarchy or the church. But with no war to fuel demand for foreign news,
their periodicals foundered.10
While the monarch used licensing to control news of church and state,
Parliament considered it a breach of privilege to publish accounts of its
proceedings. Vote counts and summaries of speeches still spread by word of
mouth, through scribal newsletters and in “separates,” a term used to desig-
nate manuscripts containing a single text written up with the intention of
being circulated, whether for money or not. During the 1620s, when Charles
I struggled against an increasingly vociferous Parliament, enterprising scriv-
eners produced summaries of parliamentary proceedings for paying custom-
ers.11 When the Civil War broke out in 1641–2, scriveners gathered rumors
and solicited details from Members of Parliament (who often had their own
reasons for leaking information) and sold their reports in stalls near West-
minster Hall. Some of these scriveners began issuing “diurnals” (i.e. journals)
that provided a day-by-day account of proceedings. By the summer of 1641
printers began reproducing the manuscript diurnals, and shortly thereafter
one of the leading scriveners, Samuel Pecke, collaborated with a printer to
issue a weekly periodical. He was soon imitated (and copied) by many other
“newsbooks.” (They were called newsbooks because they were small pamph-
lets of eight or sixteen pages, and they often had continuous pagination,
enabling readers to bind successive issues together in annual volumes.)
Printing significantly reduced the cost for the purchaser. Whereas a manu-
script diurnal might cost 1s. 6d., many newsbooks sold for a penny (1/18th of
the price).12
 The Rise of the Newspaper 23
Writers, printers, and booksellers exploited the volatile political situation in
the early 1640s to produce a wide range of unlicensed publications devoted to
military and political developments. Writers attended trials and criminal
executions, where they recorded speeches in shorthand and rushed them
into print, usually as small pamphlets or broadsides. The scaffold speech was
an important genre that enabled writers to develop many of the skills that
would later be associated with reporters: writers attended the event, talked to
witnesses, and recorded the words spoken.13 Reporting parliamentary debates
remained more difficult, because the doors were closed to non-members and
Parliament sought to keep the press within limits. On several occasions in
1642–3 both Houses of Parliament summoned writers, printers, and booksell-
ers for passages that members deemed “scandalous” and several of them spent
time in prison.14
In 1643, a parliamentary ordinance specified that all printed works had to
be approved by Parliament and registered with the Company of Stationers. To
reduce the flow of unlicensed publications, the Stationers’ Company worked
with officials of the City of London to crack down on the hawkers—men,
women, and children—who distributed all sorts of cheap pamphlets, broad-
sides, and newsbooks. Although individual stationers probably relied on
hawkers to reach more customers, the Company blamed them for selling
pirated editions and scandalous books with which they did not want to be
associated. At the Stationers’ request, the Common Council of the City of
London ordered the arrest and corporal punishment of anyone found selling
books, pamphlets, or papers on the street.15
Despite attempts to maintain order by Parliament, the City, and the
Stationers’ Company, newsbooks flourished until 1649, a year in which fifty-
four different titles were published. Weekly newsbooks probably sold 250–500
copies per issue and up to 1000 copies in exceptional cases. Total readership
would have been higher because copies were passed around and read aloud in
public. Most newsbooks contained no paid advertisements (there were occa-
sional ads for books being sold by the publisher of the newsbook) and so
publishers relied entirely on sales for income.16 After the execution of the King
and the creation of the Commonwealth, Parliament again established a strict
licensing system in September 1649. The number of authorized news publi-
cations shrunk dramatically under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, and few of
them dared to criticize the Lord Protector. In the first half of the 1650s there
were between eight and fourteen news periodicals circulating at any one time,
but in 1655 Cromwell suppressed all but two official publications.17
After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Parliament passed “An Act
for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable, and
Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets; and for Regulating Printing Presses”
(1662). This is often referred to as the Licensing Act because it required all
printed matter to be licensed by a royal censor and registered with the
24 Will Slauter
Stationers’ Company. But the act regulated all aspects of the trade: it con-
firmed the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly, restricted printing to London,
and limited the number of presses (each master printer was allowed two
presses and over time the number of master printers was to be reduced to
twenty).18
The secretaries of state had licensing authority over “affairs of state,” which
included news. In 1663 Charles II granted Roger L’Estrange, a zealous licenser,
the exclusive right to print and sell “all Narratives or relacions not exceeding
two sheets of Paper & all Advertisements, Mercuries, Diurnalls & books of
Publick Intelligence.”19 Granting L’Estrange a monopoly on all sorts of news
publications made sense to Charles II, who sought to curtail discussion of the
legitimacy of the restored monarchy. But an undersecretary of state named
Joseph Williamson soon set in motion a plan to replace L’Estrange’s news-
papers with an official publication under the direct control of the secretaries of
state. In exchange for compensation, L’Estrange agreed to end his news
publications early in 1666, though he retained the exclusive right to print
advertisements (discussed below). Williamson’s official newspaper began as
the Oxford Gazette in November 1665 (the court was in exile there during part
of the “Great Plague”), and changed its name to the London Gazette in
February 1666.20
Williamson hired an editor for the Gazette, but he kept the best intelligence
for his own subscription newsletter business. Williamson’s letters and those of
his correspondents traveled postage-free, enabling him to collect news from
throughout the kingdom and abroad. Hand-copied newsletters were sent out
to paying subscribers and others who received them in exchange for providing
intelligence. Local postmasters in particular were expected to summarize
information and rumors that they found in the letters under their care.
Williamson returned the favor by sending them free copies of the London
Gazette that they could sell to local customers. Postmasters also distributed
copies to inns, taverns, and coffeehouses. In this way, the Post Office was both
a means for the monarchy to disseminate its official version of events and a
powerful apparatus for collecting intelligence and monitoring personal com-
munications.21 Charles II responded vigorously to criticism of his policies by
issuing several proclamations banning discussion of affairs of state in coffee-
houses and other public places; individuals who merely listened to such
“licentious talk” or “false news” were liable for punishment unless they
reported it to a Justice of the Peace within twenty-four hours.22
The London Gazette’s monopoly on printed news ended temporarily during
the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81), when fears of a Catholic conspiracy (the so-
called “Popish Plot”) led the emerging Country Party (later to be known as the
Whigs) to support the exclusion of Charles II’s Catholic brother James from
the throne, while the Court Party (the Tories) opposed this exclusion.
A number of unlicensed pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers appeared
 The Rise of the Newspaper 25
during this controversy, and their suppression was made more difficult by the
lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679. (The Act, first passed in 1662, had to be
periodically renewed, and Parliament set this aside while it attempted to
exclude Charles II’s brother James from the throne.)23 In the absence of
licensing, Charles II sought to use royal prerogative to suppress the news-
papers that had appeared in 1679–80. He solicited the opinions of judges, who
reported to the Privy Council in May 1680 that the king could legally prohibit
any news publication that he deemed a danger to public peace. Charles II
immediately issued a proclamation banning the publication of news without
prior authorization, but some MPs cited this as an abuse of royal authority
designed to usurp the function of Parliament. By the end of 1680, probably
with the encouragement of some MPs, several Whig printers again began
printing newspapers.24 Roger L’Estrange defended the monarchy in a period-
ical called The Observator in Question and Answer (1681–7). After the acces-
sion of James II in 1685, Parliament renewed the Licensing Act, eliminating
the unlicensed papers and leaving the London Gazette and L’Estrange’s
Observator as the only newspapers down to 1688. James II’s administration
also cracked down on the circulation of manuscript newsletters through the
post and in coffeehouses.25
As James II struggled to keep his grip on power, a number of pamphlets and
broadsides appeared, but printed periodicals remained too risky. It was only
after the king fled in December 1688 that four unlicensed newspapers were set
up, and they did not last long because the new king, William III, sought to
limit ongoing discussion of events. In January 1689 the London Gazette
complained about “divers False, Scandalous and Seditious Books, Papers of
News, and Pamphlets, daily Printed and Dispersed, containing idle and
mistaken Relations of what passes” and explained that orders had been
given “to apprehend all such Authors, Printers, Booksellers, Hawkers and
others, as shall be found to Print, Sell, or Disperse the same.”26 In February
the monarchy appointed a Messenger of the Press to enforce licensing. The
Bill of Rights of 1689 did not guarantee freedom of the press, and Parliament
continued to assert its privilege of secrecy. The London Gazette remained the
only authorized political newspaper.27
Nevertheless, the Glorious Revolution could be considered a turning point
for two reasons. First, the commercial, fiscal, and military developments that
occurred after 1688 generated an increased demand for the kinds of informa-
tion for which periodicals were ideally suited: regular updates on prices,
market conditions, and political circumstances affecting trade.28 The business
press grew and diversified: merchants could now subscribe not only to price
currents and stock exchange currents but also to marine lists, which provided
information about the arrival and departure of ships in various ports. The
public also had access to periodicals containing practical information about
agriculture and industry, such as John Houghton’s Collection for Improvement
26 Will Slauter
of Husbandry and Trade (1692–1703). Secondly, after 1688, Whigs in Parlia-
ment began to associate licensing with arbitrary rule and monopoly, making it
more difficult to defend the Licensing Act when it came up for renewal. Most
arguments against pre-publication censorship in the late seventeenth century
centered on religious toleration (the idea that freedom of conscience should
extend to freedom of expression about religious views), but as party politics
developed it became clear that censorship could become a political weapon
wielded by the party in power. Meanwhile, the trade restrictions contained in
the Licensing Act also came under increased scrutiny. The act limited printing
and bookselling to London and to members of the Stationers’ Company, a
handful of whom claimed a perpetual property right in the most profitable
books. When the act came up for renewal in 1693, several printers and
booksellers complained to the House of Commons about this disparity within
the trade, insisting that licensing enabled a few stationers to monopolize
certain categories of works under the pretext of preventing “seditious” publi-
cations. Parliament ultimately renewed the Licensing Act, but only for one year
and to the end of the next session. By the time the act came up for renewal again
in 1695, the philosopher John Locke had prepared a written critique of licensing
that highlighted the dangers of both ecclesiastical censorship and trade monop-
olies, and the MP Edward Clarke used Locke’s remarks to campaign against
renewal of the existing act. In March 1695 and again in November 1695 Clarke
sponsored bills that would have reduced the power of the Stationers’ Company
and either eliminated licensing or diluted it, but neither of these bills made it out
of committee before the end of the session. The result was that the Licensing Act
lapsed and no new regulations replaced it.29

THE PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

OF NEWS AFTER 1695

In retrospect, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 created a major opening
for newspapers, though at the time it was not clear that licensing had ended for
good. The Stationers’ Company repeatedly petitioned Parliament for some
form of press regulation. Because licensing had combined authorization to
print and sell a particular work with the exclusive right to do so, the lapse of
licensing led printers and booksellers to complain about the spread of “piracy.”
The term piracy had been used to describe violations of trade customs (such
as printing a work registered by another stationer) as early as the mid-
seventeenth century, but it became much more common in the years after
1695.30 Among MPs, meanwhile, the proliferation of newspapers raised the
question of whether or not they should be licensed. In 1696, the House of
Commons briefly considered a “Bill to prevent the Writing, Printing, and
 The Rise of the Newspaper 27
Publishing any News without License.”31 Yet no such law was passed, and
from this point on no monarch asserted a prerogative power over news; such a
move would have smacked of arbitrary rule at a time when Parliament was
debating how best to regulate printing. Most members of the trade assumed
that some form of licensing would be reinstated, and numerous bills were
proposed in the ten years after 1695. But licensing had become too contro-
versial to obtain a majority in Parliament, and government now turned to the
common law of seditious libel as a way of exercising censorship after publi-
cation rather than before. Seditious libel was understood to include any public
statement tending to encourage contempt or ridicule of the government
(church and state) or its officials.32
The end of licensing therefore did not immediately lead to newspapers that
were highly critical of the monarch, ministers, or MPs. The newspapers
that appeared after 1695 did not avoid domestic politics entirely, but they
were more cautious than those of 1641–2 or 1679–80. Three of them—the
Flying-Post, which became increasingly Whig, the Post-Boy, which was asso-
ciated with the Tories, and the Post-Man, which focused on foreign news—
appeared three times a week until the early 1730s. The reference to the “post”
in all of these titles made clear that newspapers depended on regular mail
delivery (now three times a week to and from London) to obtain news and
distribute it to customers. Focusing on short bulletins of news and avoiding
political commentary, they resembled the early corantos much more than the
newsbooks of the Civil War era.33 Although the tone of the tri-weekly news-
papers reflected party politics, they were not free to print parliamentary
proceedings. The Lords and Commons considered it a breach of privilege to
publish the debates or identify individual members by name and they insisted
on this privilege until the 1770s (see next section). But accounts of Parliament
did leak out in subscription newsletters, whose writers paid clerks for minutes
of proceedings, obtained snippets of news from those who had attended
debates, and collected gossip in coffeehouses. Unlike their counterparts in
the 1660s and 1670s, these writers did not work directly for the secretaries of
state, and so they had to find a balance between serving their elite customers
and avoiding trouble with Parliament. John Dyer, who circulated a written
newsletter three times a week from at least 1688 until his death in 1713, was
arrested several times and brought before the Commons and Lords. Although
Parliament watched Dyer closely, they never punished him severely. The
longevity of his and other newsletters reveals that elite readers in the early
eighteenth century sought out news from a range of manuscript and printed
sources.34
The early eighteenth century marked a transition period in attitudes toward
censorship. The government prosecuted a number of writers and printers for
seditious libel, but some political leaders also began to see the benefits of
counteracting criticism by commissioning writers to defend their policies.
28 Will Slauter
Robert Harley, an influential minister under Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14),
mobilized the talents of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others.35 Robert
Walpole expanded this practice after he became de facto Prime Minister in
1721. By the 1720s, the official London Gazette was no match for papers like
the London Journal (1720–34) or the Craftsman (1726–52), which had the
active support of opposition leaders. Walpole therefore purchased the London
Journal, set up new papers to defend his policies, and arranged for copies to be
sent postage-free to provincial readers. Meanwhile, the ministry employed an
agent to monitor newspapers and pamphlets for seditious material. Printers
and press workers were just as vulnerable as writers. For example, during the
prosecution of the outspoken Jacobite printer-writer Nathaniel Mist in 1728,
several members of his staff were punished, from the compositor who set the
type to the woman who sold the paper in the streets.36
Printers in England’s North American colonies had to worry about the
common law of seditious libel, but they also faced royal governors, councils,
and assemblies that at various points asserted control over what could be
printed.37 The government of Massachusetts shut down Benjamin Harris’s
Public Occurrences after one issue in 1690 because he took liberties reporting
both local and international affairs. Still, Harris had only envisioned a monthly
publication: local news spread by word of mouth, news from England rarely
arrived more than once a month, and Boston was not yet connected by post to
other colonial cities, making it nearly impossible to collect enough news for
weekly publication.38
The expansion of the post, combined with the end of licensing in 1695,
enabled the growth of newspapers in the English provinces and in North
America. The Licensing Act had restricted printing to London; within ten
years of its lapse there were weekly newspapers in Bristol, Norwich, Exeter,
and Boston, Massachusetts.39 Whereas in English towns printers started
newspapers, in Boston postmasters ran the first successful titles. In 1704, the
Boston postmaster John Campbell hired the printer Bartholomew Green to
produce the Boston News-Letter (1704–76, with interruptions), which was an
outgrowth of a manuscript newsletter started by his father. As postmaster,
Campbell could send and receive letters free of postage (known as a franking
privilege), and for fifteen years he used this advantage to gather intelligence
and distribute his newspaper to customers. The government did not fund
Campbell’s paper directly, though it was licensed by the office of the royal
governor, which occasionally relied on it to publish official texts. The Post-
master General in London replaced Campbell in 1718, and his successor
started the Boston Gazette (1719–98), again hiring a printer to do the work.
The third Boston paper—the New-England Courant (1721–6)—did not enjoy
postal privileges. Unlike other publications, it featured prose and verse con-
tributions by a group of local writers, including essays that were critical of
clergymen and the colonial government. The authorities responded by
 The Rise of the Newspaper 29
sending its printer James Franklin to prison and prohibiting him from con-
tinuing the paper (although it continued for a while under James’s brother
Benjamin Franklin).40
Most colonial printers chose to exercise some self-censorship to avoid such
trouble with the authorities, not least because they wanted government print-
ing contracts. Indeed, newspapers tended to be part of a larger printing and
retailing business. Setting up a printing shop required an investment of a little
more than £100 in equipment; presses and type had to be imported from
England or purchased or inherited from an existing printer. A successful
printing shop combined job printing (any work done for a paying customer),
government contracts (for printing laws, notices, currency, etc.), and a news-
paper sold by annual subscription.41 When it came to selling news, printers
found that subscription-based periodicals had several advantages over separ-
ate publications: a steady weekly production schedule, dedicated customers in
known locations, and a regular flow of income from advertisements and
subscriptions, although money remained difficult to collect. Between 1700
and 1765, three quarters of colonial printers had a newspaper at one time or
another. Of the sixty titles launched during that time, ten lasted less than two
years, ten lasted between two and four years, and ten lasted between five and
nine years; nineteen of the papers lasted twenty years or more, suggesting that
the subscription newspaper had become an important component of a suc-
cessful printing business.42
Printing shops in colonial America were family businesses in which wives
and daughters worked alongside nephews and cousins. Some women took
charge of printing shops after their husbands’ deaths. Elizabeth Timothy of
Charleston, for example, managed the business (including the newspaper)
from 1738 to 1746, when she passed it on to her son. In Williamsburg,
Clementina Rind inherited her husband’s shop in 1773 and edited the Virginia
Gazette until her own death in 1774. About twenty-five women ran printing
shops in America before 1820. The family nature of printing businesses in
the eighteenth century meant that women often played a greater role in the
production and distribution of news than they would in later periods.43
In Britain there was no licensing after 1695, but successive governments
used taxation to discourage the circulation of the cheapest newspapers
(which they associated with more radical ideas) and to raise revenue.44 The
first Stamp Act went into effect in 1712; newspapers printed on a half sheet
of paper had to pay a halfpenny tax per copy, and those printed on a whole
sheet had to pay a full penny per copy. The logistics were especially difficult
for printers in the provinces, because stamped sheets had to be purchased
from London in advance of printing, and several papers went out of
business in 1712.45 But printers in London and the provinces quickly found
ways to adapt. They noticed that the act did not clearly define “newspaper”
and contained no provision for those printed on more than a full sheet of
30 Will Slauter
paper. Many printers expanded their publications to 1½ sheets, which they
folded so as to create six-page newspapers selling for 1½ d. per copy. This
tactic enabled them to pay the much lower duty for pamphlets—2s. per edition
regardless of the number of copies. Other printers evaded the tax entirely, and
by the 1720s a range of illegal unstamped publications were being hawked on
the streets of London for as little as half a penny. To eliminate the unstamped
papers, the government went after the hawkers and street vendors. A 1743 law
specified fines and imprisonment for anyone selling unstamped papers, and
vigorous enforcement put such papers out of business almost immediately.46
The loophole allowing newspapers of more than one sheet to register as
pamphlets was closed in 1725, and most of the weeklies scaled back from six
pages to four and raised their prices from 1½d. to 2d. Because space was now
more limited, some printers experimented with reducing the size of type and
increasing the number of columns from two to three. During the 1730s and
1740s, many newspapers expanded the size of their sheets so as to squeeze
more news and advertisements into each issue without paying more tax.47 The
stamp tax was raised again in 1757 (to finance the Seven Years’ War),
increasing the average price of a newspaper to 2½d. That price represented
about 5 percent of a London laborer’s weekly wages and 10 percent of an
agricultural worker’s weekly wages. In 1776 the tax rose again (to finance the
American War), leading most papers to raise their prices to 3d.48
Newspapers complained about the duties, but they were largely able to pass
the cost on to their elite customers. The decline in total sales after 1712 did not
last long, and the tax increases of 1757 and 1776 did not cause significant
drops in circulation. But the success of unstamped papers between 1712 and
1743 (when they were suppressed) suggests that newspapers could have
reached a wider public if they had not been taxed. In fact, the circulation of
individual titles did not increase dramatically during this period. Around 1720
the London dailies probably sold 800 copies each, the tri-weeklies 2500, and
the weeklies 3500. By 1775, the morning dailies and evening tri-weeklies
dominated with between 2000 and 5000 copies each.49 Proprietors attempted
to appeal to a broader range of customers—female readers, country readers,
the beau monde—but before 1776 newspapers depended primarily on a public
of merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers earning at least £50 per year.50
The laws requiring newspaper stamps also imposed duties on advertise-
ments, but this did not stop ads from transforming the business of news
during the eighteenth century. The corantos of the 1620s and 1630s did not
contain paid ads, nor did the newsbooks of the 1640s. L’Estrange’s official
publications in the early 1660s averaged about seven ads per issue. The London
Gazette originally had a policy against advertisements, which were “not
properly the business of a Paper of Intelligence.” Over time the Gazette
came to include paid notices, but during the 1670s, 1680s, and 1690s there
were also periodicals entirely devoted to ads and distributed free of charge.
 The Rise of the Newspaper 31
One of these, The City Mercury: Or, Advertisements concerning Trade
(1675–78?) was published with the authorization (and perhaps the financial
involvement) of L’Estrange, who had received a monopoly on advertisements
back in 1663. The lapse of licensing in 1695 ended restrictions on who could
operate a press as well as who could print advertisements. After 1695 free
advertising periodicals in the vein of The City Mercury were apparently unable
to compete with the tri-weekly and daily newspapers that also contained ads.51
The space devoted to advertisements in eighteenth-century English and
American newspapers represented a major cultural and economic change. The
first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant (1702–35), devoted about one half
(and sometimes up to two thirds) of its space to advertisements. In the Daily
Post (1719–46) and the Daily Advertiser (1731–98) advertisements took up
as much as three quarters of the space, including most of the first page.52
The success of provincial papers like the Newcastle Courant (1711–69) also
depended upon their ability to attract advertisers.53 In colonial America at
least a full page (and often two) were devoted to ads for goods and services.
A study of the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1728 to 1765 revealed that about
45 percent of available printing space was devoted to ads.54 In most cases ads
were submitted directly to the printer by local merchants, shopkeepers, and
other individuals selling property, looking for workers, or offering rewards
for runaway slaves and servants.55
To what extent did ads pay for eighteenth-century newspapers? Financial
records from the period are extremely rare, but surviving evidence reveals the
basic pattern. For the first eight months of 1707 the London Gazette took in
£1,135 from sales and £790 (41 percent) from advertisements. The Gazette was
published less frequently and had fewer advertisements than other London
papers, but it charged much more (10s. per notice as opposed to 2s. or 2s. 6d.)
and its wide distribution made it the preferred place for announcing auctions,
real estate, and lost or stolen goods. Over time the Gazette lost ground to the
daily and tri-weekly “advertisers” whose titles reflected the importance of ads
in attracting readers. In 1775, the Public Advertiser raised £560 from sales and
£388 (41 percent) from advertisements.56 The accounts for the Pennsylvania
Gazette during the period that Benjamin Franklin and David Hall were joint
owners (1748–66) reveal a higher proportion of sales receipts (£750 per year
on average) to advertising income (£200 per year on average). The Pennsyl-
vania Gazette had a much higher circulation than most colonial papers—as
many as 2,500 a year compared to an average of 700 or 800—so sales may have
comprised a greater proportion of revenue than it did for other papers, but it is
important to remember that Franklin and Hall also made money printing ads
separate from the newspaper (i.e. handbills or broadsides paid for by local
businesses).57 James Parker, who claimed to have 700 subscribers to his
New York Gazette in 1769, referred to advertisements as “the Life of a
Paper.” He also reported that 25 percent of his subscribers never paid their
32 Will Slauter
bills, making cash payments for ads all the more important.58 A detailed study
of the Salisbury Journal and the Hampshire Chronicle showed how newspaper
proprietors in English towns also saw advertisements as the main source of
profits.59
The boundary between news and advertisements was not always clear.
Office copies of the Daily Advertiser from 1744 (on which an employee
recorded the rate charged for each notice) show that “puffs” promoting a
product or event were charged the same rate as ads but evaded the tax on
advertisements because they were disguised as news.60 Some newspapers also
agreed to print reports for individuals in exchange for payment. When a
reader complained about a poorly written obituary in 1765, the editor of the
Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (1764–96) replied, “that paragraph was
inserted and paid for by a friend of the deceased; and we are no more
accountable for the diction thereof, than for any other paragraph or adver-
tisement which people pay to have inserted.”61
Meanwhile, not all genuine ads were paid for because the financial partners
in newspapers often reserved the right to insert notices.62 In fact, one of the
main attractions for the London booksellers, theater managers, and auction
houses that invested in newspapers was that they provided an advertising
channel for their other products. By the 1720s, group ownership was common
for London newspapers, and booksellers tended to dominate the lists of
shareholders.63 This fact helps to explain the preponderance of ads for
books, but books were also, along with medicines, the first nationally distrib-
uted products. The consortium model of newspaper ownership satisfied three
aims: it distributed the financial risk of publication among several partners,
created a new sideline revenue stream (in the form of dividends), and enabled
booksellers, theater managers, and others to promote their primary products,
which were often time-sensitive (a new edition of a book, a play held over for
another night, an auction, etc.). In English towns outside of London, group
ownership also became more common after the mid-century, but most pro-
vincial newspapers remained part of a family business that also included
job printing and retail sales of books, stationery, medicine, and household
goods.64
In terms of distribution, London newspapers increasingly relied on whole-
salers, especially the so-called “mercury women,” who bought pamphlets and
periodicals in bulk, sold some out of their shops and distributed the rest to
hawkers (many of whom were also women). Elizabeth Nutt, a widow and
mother of printers, oversaw several shops with the assistance of her daughters,
and was one of the leading distributors of newspapers in London during the
first half of the eighteenth century. Another mercury woman named Anne
Dodd also distributed large quantities of pamphlets and newspapers. In 1731,
for example, she handled 2,700 out of 10,000 total copies of the London
Journal. Compared to later periods, when the production and distribution of
 The Rise of the Newspaper 33
newspapers became overwhelmingly masculine, in the early to mid-eighteenth
century women remained crucial to the dissemination of news.65
Improvements in transportation during the eighteenth century facilitated
the growth of the newspaper press in London and the provinces. The turnpike
network expanded, road conditions improved, and horse and wagon carrier
services became cheaper and faster. Many newspaper publishers set up their
own distribution networks. The provincial papers in particular relied on
booksellers, grocers, schoolmasters, and others to manage delivery. These
agents collected payment from subscribers, took in advertisements (for
which they received a commission) and supervised delivery by newsmen
(for subscribers) and hawkers (for casual buyers). The newsmen sold a range
of goods offered by the newspaper proprietor and his agents (books, station-
ery, medicine, etc.), and the sale of these ancillary products helped ensure
delivery of newspapers in more remote areas. If the newsmen had carried only
newspapers, they may not have found it worthwhile to visit far-flung custom-
ers. Newspaper owners benefited from having dedicated newsmen who made
regular contact with their customers; meanwhile, the purveyors of goods and
services (such as medicines and insurance) exploited these sales networks and
paid to insert ads in the newspapers.66
London newspapers relied on the royal post to a much greater extent than
their provincial counterparts. To reduce costs, London publishers made deals
with postal officials known as Clerks of the Road. In exchange for a fee, the
clerks used their franking privileges to send newspapers from London to local
postmasters around the country. The postmasters paid the clerks 2d. per copy,
which they passed on to subscribers. The use of franks therefore benefited the
customer (who paid less than if regular postage were charged) and the postal
officials (who collected fees, effectively acting as wholesalers). Some postal
officials also became shareholders in newspapers, and contemporaries accused
them of favoring the distribution of certain titles. Because they were govern-
ment officials, they also felt pressure to impede newspapers that criticized the
administration and favor those that praised it (this clearly happened during
the age of Walpole).67 Members of Parliament also had franking privileges,
which they used to send newspapers postage-free to friends and constituents.
In an effort to prevent people from forging an MP’s signature on newspapers,
a 1764 Act allowed MPs to send orders to the Post Office specifying which
newspapers they wished to frank. Certain members of the parliamentary
opposition exploited this measure to frank large quantities of newspapers on
behalf of printers. In the early 1760s, newspapers franked by MPs had made
up about 25 percent of those traveling through the mail. By 1782, the propor-
tion was 60 percent.68 The widespread franking of newspapers had not been
intended by Parliament, but it clearly enabled readers throughout the country
to obtain newspapers at a significantly reduced cost (postage would have
added 2–3d. to the cost of each newspaper).69
34 Will Slauter
Newspaper distribution worked differently in the American colonies for
two reasons. First, newspapers were not affected by stamp and advertising
duties, with the exception of a brief period during the Seven Years’ War, when
Massachusetts and New York temporarily imposed a halfpenny tax on news-
papers to raise revenue.70 Second, the royal post was far less developed in
America. Many printers served as local postmasters, but in towns where there
was more than one printer, only one of them could be postmaster, and he had
a major advantage in terms of obtaining intelligence and ensuring delivery to
his own subscribers. There was no uniform rate for sending newspapers
through the post, and printers could not always rely on the horse riders to
deliver in a timely manner. Riders had limited capacity and would refuse to
carry newspapers when they became too burdensome. Moreover, the royal
post mainly connected the towns along the coast and only went as far south as
Virginia. For all of these reasons, printers (especially those who were not
postmasters) often hired their own newsboys (for local delivery) and riders
(for more distant subscribers). These ad hoc distribution channels were crucial
to newspaper owners throughout the colonial period.71

DAILIES, WEEKLIES, AND MONTHLIES: BUSINESS

PRACTICE AND JOURNALISTIC CULTURE

Writers, printers, and booksellers experimented with a number of different

forms of publication during the early eighteenth century.72 While editing the
official London Gazette, Richard Steele launched a tri-weekly publication
called the Tatler (1709–10). The Tatler followed the form of the Gazette
(two columns of text printed on both sides of a single sheet), but in addition
to news and advertisements it contained longer essays on social and literary
topics, most of which were written by Steele and Joseph Addison.73 Steele and
Addison also collaborated on the Spectator (daily, 1711–12), which combined
reader correspondence with essays on cultural and economic issues of the day,
and was reprinted numerous times in book form during the eighteenth
century. Other essay-based periodicals in the 1710s were more overtly polit-
ical, such as Jonathan Swift’s The Examiner (1710–14). All of these periodicals
depended upon the talents of particular writers, many of whom benefited from
patronage. Addison and Steele had various government appointments and
Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s. Robert Harley paid Defoe to write the Review
of the Affairs of France (1704–13), which largely supported Harley’s own
policies.74
Alongside newspapers and essay periodicals, writers and printers experi-
mented with monthly digests of recent events. Abel Boyer’s Present State of
Europe (1690–1738) compiled reports of foreign affairs and parliamentary
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 CHAPTER VIII.

CHEMICAL, MEDICAL
AND

DIETICAL PROPERTIES.

Tea in chemistry is a complex mixture of a variety of substances,

including Theine, Tannin, Dextrine, Glucose, Gum and an essential
oil known as Volatile, which, together with a portion of the ash, pass
into the solution when tea is infused. Being a leaf it also contains
some woody fibre, the quantity of which as determined by Mulder,
ranges from 17.1 in Green to 28.3 per cent. in Black teas. According
to Peligot, whose admirable investigation of tea ranks as a chemical
classic, it also contains a large quantity of legumen, a nitrogenous
substance, sometimes termed vegetable Caseine, the percentage of
which, as given by Peligot, is about 15 per cent. in tea in its usual
commercial state. The woody fibre, legumen, some tannin coloring-
matter and a certain quantity of the ash make up mainly the portion
of the leaf which is not soluble in boiling water. In its commercial
state tea is not subject to much irregularity in a hygrometric
condition, there being only about 8 per cent. of moisture in it, which
may fall to 6 or rise to 10 per cent. from outside causes.
Tea has been analyzed by many other chemists, but owing to a
difference in the variety, character, quality, age, color and methods of
preparation of the specimens submitted, the results have been as
varied. The average composition in parts range as follows:—
 Chemical Constituents. Quantities.
Theine, 3
Tannin, 25
Volatile Oil, 1
Albuminoids, 15
Mineral Matter, 6
Gum and 21
Glucose,
Vegetable 20
Fibre,
Fatty 4
Substances,
Water of 5
Absorption,
———
Total, 100

Theine—Is the alkaloid of tea and is the substance to which it owes

its refreshing and stimulating properties. It is a crystallizable matter,
soluble in water, very bitter to the taste and characteristic alike of
both tea and coffee, being to these beverages what quinine is to
bark, and with the base of cocoa which has recently received the
name of “theobromine,” it is also closely related. It is further
remarkable as occurring in many other plants dissimilar in structure
and character, grown in remote countries, but yet selected by the
inhabitants on account of their yielding a slightly exciting and
refreshing beverage, and to the presence of which the peculiar
physiological action of tea on the animal economy is attributed. It
was first discovered under the name of Caffeine by Runge, who
originally found it in Coffee, and later by Oudry, who extracted an
identical substance from tea, to which he gave the name of Theine.
Strickler subsequently produced it from cocoa, naming it
Theobromine. These bodies are evidently related to uric acid as like
it, when exposed to the action of nitric acid and ammonia they yield a
purple coloring matter, technically termed murioxide.
Theine is a substance which crystallizes very beautifully, forming
white, silk-like crystals containing an atom of water of crystallization,
the specific gravity of which is 1.23 at 1°C., and the 9 water of
crystallization is not altogether evaporated by a temperature of 150°.
As deposited from aqueous solutions it still contains an atom of
water, but as deposited from solutions in alcohol or ether, or when
sublimed it is anhydrous. It is much more soluble in hot than cold
water or in alcohol or ether, and according to Peligot, one part of
theine dissolves in 300 parts ether or in 93 parts water at ordinary
temperatures. It is a base of the same class as aniline and urea, that
is to say, it will combine with acids yielding crystalline compounds,
but never neutralizing an acid. With chloride of platinum, chloride of
gold and corrosive sublimate, the hydrochlorate of theine enters into
combination, forming a double salt with each. As will be manifest
from its formula—C8—H10—N4O2—theine is one of the most highly
nitrogenous substances known to chemists, and connected with this
high percentage of nitrogen (almost double that formed in any other
albuminous substance) is its property of yielding an abundance of
cyanides when fused with soda lime, which property distinguishes it
from a number of organic bases, such as piperine, morphine, quinine
and cinchonine. With the base of cocoa—which has received the
name of theobromine—theine is also closely related, being nothing
more than methylated theobromine. Strecker having produced it from
theobromine by acting upon a silver derivative with iodide of methyl,
in a sealed tube heated at 100°. Theine exists in tea, not in the free
state, but in the form of tannate of tea, which appears to be
dissolved by the excess of tannic acid contained by the tea leaf, and
so it happens that the theine makes its appearance in the infusion
instead of remaining in the exhausted leaves. The proportion of
theine in tea has been variously given by different chemists. Mulder
finding 0.43 per cent. in Green tea and 0.46 in Black, while
Stenhouse found 1.05 and 1.27 in Green and Black respectively.
Peligot found 2.34 and 3.0, and Zoller, whose research is
comparatively recent, found 3.94 per cent. of theine in India tea. But
it would be a mistake to regard these varying results as showing that
the quantity of theine in tea is variable, as they serve only to illustrate
the difficulties which stand in the way of a quantitative extraction of
the theine, and the imperfection of the earlier methods. In Peligot’s
paper, these difficulties are referred to, and by making an attempt to
extract the theine from a sample of tea the chemist acquires a sense
of the truth of them. The experiments of the latter, however, being of
great interest to chemists merits a somewhat detailed description.
He began by determining the total amount of nitrogen contained in
the dried leaves of different kinds of China tea at 110°, finding 6.15
per cent. in 100 parts of Oolong, 6.58 in Congou, and 6.30 in Green
tea, while from one sample of India he extracted only 5.10 per cent.,
proportions six times greater than had been heretofore obtained by
any previous analysis. Next testing every soluble substance for
nitrogenous matter, he proceeded by successive eliminations to
ascertain the quantity of theine in 27 other different samples and
found that Green teas contained on an average 10 per cent. of
water, and Black only 8 per cent., and also that the latter contained
about 43.2 of matter soluble in boiling water while the former
averaged as high as 47.1, and that this soluble matter yielded only
4.35 of nitrogen in Black teas, and 4.70 per cent. in Green. It
remaining to be determined whether this large percentage of
nitrogen was wholly due to the theine or in part to some other
principle, he next found that the precipitate with sub-acetate of lead
contained no apparent quantity, and then testing the theine by a
modification of Mulder’s process obtained from Green tea an
average of 2.48 per cent., and from a mixture of Green and Black
2.70. But greatly as these quantities exceed those of all other
chemists, they were still unable to account for the whole amount of
nitrogen found in the infusion, so by adding mere acetate of lead and
ammonia, separating them by filtration, and passing through it a
current of sulphuretted hydrogen to precipitate the lead, and
evaporating the liquid with a gentle heat he obtained an abundant
supply of crystals of theine. This supply he still further increased by
re-evaporation until the whole amounted to 3.48 per cent. of the
entire. There still remaining a syrup containing some theine it was
precipitated with tannic acid, the result being added to that already
crystallized it yielded a total of 5.84 from Green tea in the natural
state and 6.21 in the dried leaf. These experiments being further
continued by boiling the exhausted leaves with potash, it showed a
presence of caseine to the extent of 28 per cent. of the mass, the
proportion of the latter substance in the raw leaf being only 14 to 15.
Theine is extracted from tea by boiling a quantity of the leaves in a
considerably larger quantity of distilled water and the liquor
squeezed out of the leaves which are to be boiled with a fresh
quantity of water and again subjected to pressure, the process being
repeated a third time. The several portions of the infusion expressed
from the leaves are put in the same vessel, mixed together
thoroughly and treated with an excess of acetate of lead and
ammonia, which precipitates the tannin and coloring matter. The
liquor is next filtered and the filtrate evaporated down to a small bulk,
first over a naked flame and afterwards in a water bath, and on being
allowed to cool the solution will deposit crude theine which is
removed by filtration, and the filtration nearly dried up in the water
bath, and the residue boiled with alcohol, which dissolves the theine
out of it. From this hot alcoholic solution theine crystallizes on
cooling, a final purification being effected by crystallization from ether
and decolorizing with animal charcoal. A simpler but less effective
method is to place the dust of finely powdered tea-leaves, or an
evaporated watery extract on a watch glass and cover it with a paper
cone and hold it over a spirit lamp or gas jet the vapor arising from
the glass condenses on the interior of the cone and forms small
crystals of theine. Concentrated sulphuric acid dissolves theine in
the cold without the production of color, but if the alkaloid be treated
with nitric acid evaporated to dryness, and the reddish-yellow
residue moistened with a little ammonia it turns a splendid purple
color. Again, if a solution of theine be evaporated with chlorine on a
watch glass a reddish-brown residue is obtained, which if again
treated with the vapor of ammonia it becomes a deep violet of which
the chief precipitants will be phosphoric acid, iodine and platinum,
forming a yellow and brown precipitate respectively.
Theine having no odor and only a slightly bitter taste it obviously has
very little to do with the flavor of tea. It is, however, considered a very
valuable constituent on account of the large percentage of nitrogen
which it contains and to which is attributed the peculiar physiological
action of tea on the animal economy, but what changes it undergoes
in the human system has not yet been determined. When oxydized
artificially it decomposes into methleamic (hydrocyanic) acid, a
nitrogenous compound closely allied to caseine or gluten, and as hot
water extracts but very little of this substance a large amount of it is
wasted in the ordinary infusion, which might otherwise be saved by
the addition of a little carbonate of soda to the water in preparing it.

Tannin—A large portion of the Tea-extract consists of tannin (tannic

acid of a peculiar kind), there being much more in Green teas than in
Black, ranging from 13 to 20 per cent. in the former, and 8 to 12 per
cent. in the latter, but averaging 12 and 9.50 per cent. respectively,
the difference being due to the fact that part of the tannin originally
existing in the raw-leaf is destroyed during the process of
fermentation to which Black teas are subjected in manipulation. It is
a powerful astringent principle, puckering up the mouth when
chewed, and to which tea owes its bitterness when overdrawn or
boiled, constipating effect on the bowels, and the inky-black color
which it imparts to water containing salts-of-iron. But whether it
contributes in any degree to the exhilarating, satisfying or narcotic
action of the tea has not yet been determined. Johnston thinks it
probable that it does exert some such effect from the fact that a
species of tannin is found in the Betel-nut, which when chewed
produces a mild form of intoxication, but as to whether this property
assists or retards digestion is still an unsettled question, the old
maxim, “what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” being
particularly true of this substance. Many persons finding that the use
of tea while eating, or immediately after eating, has a soothing effect
on their system, while the same persons after drinking coffee, under
like circumstances, get nervous, and cannot digest their food
properly. As there is no tannin in coffee, it stands to reason that the
substance must have some influence on the digestive organs.
For the estimation of tannin in tea various processes are in use, a
tritration by means of a standard solution of gelatine, which depends
upon the well-known property possessed by gelatine of forming
insoluble compounds with tannin being the most effective, but
tedious and difficult. A much more simple and promising method
consists in tritrating by means of a standard solution of lead, the
point of saturation being indicated by the red color struck by an
ammoniacal solution of ferricyanide of potassium, one drop of this
solution being capable of coloring one milligram of tannin dissolved
in 100 parts of water, the exact strength of the solution of lead being
ascertained with a standard solution of tannin. In using the solution
of lead, 10 drops of it are first diluted with 9 times its volume in water,
and the tea infusion dropped into it from a graduated burette until the
indicator strikes a red with the drop of the indicator. The infusion of
tea is made by boiling 2 grains of the leaves in water and afterwards
diluting it to 250, it being understood that the smaller the quantity of
this infusion required to saturate the 10 parts of the lead solution, the
higher the percentage of tannin in the sample of tea treated. This
test is specially applicable for ascertaining whether Black tea in
particular has been mixed with spent leaves. By taking the normal
percentage of tannin in pure Black tea at 10 and the percentage of
tannin in spent tea as 2, the difference is the extent of adulteration.
There is a great variability in the amount of tannin contained in the
different varieties of tea, varying in quantity according to the country
of production, kind, quality, and state of growth when picked. In six
samples of China Oolong teas recently tested, the percentage of
tannin extracted, after an infusion of thirty minutes, averaged only
7.44, an almost similar result being obtained from an examination of
the finest Congou-China Green teas, ranging from 11.87 to 14.11 per
cent., some Japan samples under the same conditions yielding on
an average from 8 to 10. While with a sample of the finest Assam
(India) a percentage of 17.73 of tannin by actual weight was
extracted after an infusion of only fifteen minutes, two samples of
India and Ceylon giving respectively 18.91 and 15.26, proving
conclusively that India and Ceylon teas are much more heavily
weighted with tannin than China and Japan teas. The percentage of
tannin in the extract is also quite irregular, according to the quality of
the tea, the ratio of tannin to the extract varying quite uniformly with
the value of the tea, the percentage falling and rising with the
percentage of the extract and cost of the tea.

Volatile Oil—Is the principle which imparts to tea its peculiar flavor
and aroma, and upon the amount contained in the dried leaves
depends the strength and pungency of the infusion. It is present only
in very small quantities, but is, nevertheless, very potent in its
effects, the proportions ranging, according to Mulder, from 0.6 per
cent. in Black tea to 0.80 in Green, but averaging 0.75 in all good
teas. It is found by distilling the tea with water, is lighter in body than
water, citron-yellow in color, resinifying on exposure, solidifying with
cold, and exerting a powerfully exciting or stimulating effect on the
system. But there being no chemical analysis of this constituent
extant, its exact effect on the human system is difficult to define. By
some authorities it is claimed to produce wakefulness, acting, it is
said, in the same manner as digitalis (fox-glove) which, when taken
in overdoses, causes anxiety and inability to sleep. It is a well-known
fact that Green teas produce these effects, while Black does not, the
excessive fermentation to which the latter are subjected in the
process of curing, dissipating the volatile oil to a greater extent, or,
more properly, altering its general character not only in effect but
also in flavor.

Gum or Gluten—If it is necessary to estimate the quantity of gum or

gluten in tea, as sometimes happens, evaporate an aqueous
decoction of the leaves to an extract, and treat the residue with
methylated spirit, filter and wash off with hot water, after which
evaporate the solution to dryness, next weighing and burning it to an
ash and deduct the mineral residue from the original weight of the
leaves. Tea extract also yields a large quantity of ammonia when
boiled with potash, and it is probable that this character may prove
valuable also in testing the genuineness of tea. Tea leaves under an
extraordinary amount of ammonia, when submitted to this test, are
found to be remarkably rich in nitrogen, the determination of which is
also a means of identification. It may also be here remarked that
when tea-leaves have been exhausted by infusion, alcohol is still
capable of extracting a considerable amount of soluble matter. This
alcohol extract, when infused in boiling water, furnishes a liquor
which smells and tastes strongly of tea, which, were it not for the
expense of the solvent and trouble attending its separation, could no
doubt be profitably employed. A fixed oil composed of equal parts of
oleine and stearine, serving many purposes, medicinal, illuminating
and others, is extracted from the seeds of the tea-plant in many parts
of China and Tartary. The other substances extracted from the tea-
leaf consists principally of those which, in various proportions, enter
into the composition of all plants and include a modification of
constituents analagous to sugar, fat, salts, starch and water. The
fibre, tannin, legumen coloring matter and a certain quantity of ash
making up mainly the portion of the leaf insoluble in boiling water.

MEDICINAL EFFECTS.
The virtues of tea as a medicine have been extolled from the time of
its earliest use as a beverage in China. Chin-nung, a celebrated
scholar and philosopher, who existed long before Confucius, and to
whom its first discovery is attributed, is claimed to have said of it:
“Tea is better than wine, for it leadeth not to intoxication; it is better
than water, for it doth not carry disease, neither doth it act as a
poison when the wells contain foul and rotten matter;” and Lo-yu,
another learned Chinese who lived during the dynasty of Tang,
declared that “Tea tempers the spirits, harmonizes the mind, dispels
lassitude, relieves fatigue, awakens thought, prevents drowsiness,
refreshes the body and clears the perceptive faculties,” while the
Emperor Kieu-lung advised all his subjects to “Drink this precious
liquor at their ease, as it will chase away the five causes of sorrow.
You can taste and feel, but not describe the calm state of repose
produced by it.” Again, Ten Rhyne, a botanist and chemist to the
Emperor of Japan, in a work published about 1730, states that “Tea
purifies the blood, drives away frightful dreams, dispels malignant
vapors from the brain, mitigates dizziness, dries up rheum in the
eyes, corrects humors, regulates the liver, modifies the spleen,
restrains sleep, restricts drowsiness, expels lassitude, is good in
dropsy, makes the body lively, cheers the heart and drives away
fear.” But of its sanitary effects after its first introduction into Europe
there was for a long period much consternation existing, being
preposterously praised by some writers as an incentive to virtue, and
as unjustly condemned by others as productive of numerous
diseases, more particularly that of causing an increase of nervous
complaints, which it would perhaps be more just to attribute to the
more complicated state of modern social customs arising from an
augmented population and advance in luxurious living, in connection
with the more frequent infringement of the natural laws, especially
that of turning night into day, and not seldom day into night, as is the
too common practice of the votaries of fashion, together with the
abuse of stimulants, tobacco and other narcotics.
Its assailants, however, were not very distinguished, but have been
quite emphatic in their condemnation. Jonas Hanway, a man whose
follies may well be pardoned for his virtues, being, perhaps, the most
conspicuous of them. “He looked abroad upon the world, and
perceiving that many things went wrong with it, and others no longer
presented the same attractive appearance, he remembered them to
have had in his youth, he laid to the charge of tea all the evils and
disenchantments that oppressed his spirits.” “Men,” he says, “seem
to have lost their stature and comeliness and women their beauty,
and what Shakespeare had asserted to the concealment of love in
this age is more frequently occasioned by the use of tea.” The
champions of our “wholesome sage,” who contended that “it was far
superior to the boasted Indian shrub,” were but a few of the host who
attacked tea as “an innovation pregnant with danger to the health
and good morals of the people.” Others, again, although resolute for
its banishment from the tea-caddy, were yet willing to accord it a
place in the medicine chest. To such complaints echoes were not
wanting, the tea-drinkers, in a short time, having it all their own way.
Lettson was the first medical writer who attempted to give the public
a reasonable and scientific account of tea, but even his fears of its
abuse ran away with his judgment. The poet who commends “the
cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” must have been startled if
Lettson’s pamphlet ever fell into his hands, at the assertion “that the
growth of this pernicious custom (drunkenness) is often owing to the
weakness and debility of the system brought on by the daily habit of
drinking tea,” and that “the trembling hand seeks relief in some
cordial in order to refresh and excite again the enfeebled system,
whereby such persons fall into the habit of intemperance.” Here
assuredly the exception must have been taken for the rule, that tea
may be so abused as to create a craving for alcoholic stimulants is
unquestionable, but that at any period of its history its abuse has
been so general as to become the main cause of intoxication may be
safely denied. On the contrary, it was for a long time looked upon as
the great means by which intemperance was to have been banished
from society. Again, if there be any truth in this charge, why is it that
the Chinese and Japanese, who are the greatest and most
inveterate tea-consumers in the world for centuries, using it in
season and out, are yet the most temperate? It is, however, admitted
that the tremblings and other nervous effects produced by tea on
brokers and professional testers, liquor is too frequently resorted to
as an offset, and that by the practice of some tea drinkers of the
absurd and dangerous Russian and English customs of adding
vodki, gin or other alcoholic stimulant to the “cup of tea,” a habit is
oftentimes acquired which can never afterwards be relinquished.
Neither is it true, as alleged by Lettson, that the use of tea has been
the cause of the increase of nervous and kindred complaints in
colleges and seminaries. Still, his advice is sound when he states
that “tea ought by no means to be the common drink of boarding
schools, and when allowed, in moderation, the pupils should at the
same time be informed that the constant or too frequent use of tea
would be injurious to their health and constitutions. As whatever
tends to impair the nerve power and ultimately the digestive organs,
in strumuous children particularly, should be by all means avoided.”
But if a diminution of the number of inflammatory diseases be one of
the consequences of the increased consumption of tea, which is now
generally conceded, it is very much in favor of its use, as however
distracting nervous diseases may be, they are by no means so fatal
as those of an inflammatory nature, more particularly as the former
can be almost immediately remedied by relinquishing the use of tea
or by simply omitting it from the breakfast for a time, at which meal it
is certainly less proper to be used.
The medicinal uses of tea, however, are not many, neither does its
chemical analysis shed much light on its action on the human
economy, a correct estimate of its particular action thereon having so
far not been ascertained. So that before attempting any such
estimate it will be necessary to consider that many of its attributed ill-
effects may be due as much to the spurious leaves of other plants so
frequently mixed with genuine tea-leaves for adulteration purposes,
as well as to the deleterious compounds so often used in coloring,
for the results of which pure tea is held responsible. The most
dispassionate inquirers, however, regard it as a narcotic, the
stimulating period of which is most conspicuous and of the longest
duration, the active ingredient, theine, being an alkaloid identical with
the caffeine of coffee, the medical action of the tea infusion upon the
system is the result of the several effects of this alkaloid formed by
combination of the theine, tannin, volatile oil, and the hot water. Of
these elements theine probably plays the most important part, and
like all other potent alkaloids theine is a powerful modifier of the
nerve functions, increasing the action of the skin and cooling the
body by lessening the force of the circulation, but does not cause
any congestion of the mucous membrane, particularly in that of the
bowels. In answer to the question whether theine produces
nervousness and wakefulness, reliable authorities answer: No! But
that, on the contrary, the effect of theine upon the human system is a
calming and soothing one, producing a sense of repose and
supplying to the body that which is lost by fatigue.
The experiments made with tea on a number of animals for the
purpose of ascertaining its effects on the nervous and muscular
apparatus give varying results, the most important being that of
lessening the amount of nitrogenous excreta, notably that of the
urine, which means to diminish the rate at which nitrogenous
substances are oxydized within the body, such action being probably
due to the volatile oil, as Lehman found the same oil in roasted
coffee to produce the same action in his experiments. There being a
substance in the flesh or muscles of all animals known as kreatine,
the chemical properties of which are analogous to those of theine,
and it is now generally accepted that these substances are most
agreeable to the human system as food which most nearly resemble
the compound that form the tissues and muscles of the body, while
those act as poison whose composition is most different from that of
the tissues and muscles on which the life of the body depends.
Scientists who have made this subject a special study, inform us that
the substance known as kreatine is diminished by overwork and
fatigue, and that, therefore, as theine and kreatine are chemically
about one and the same property, the theory is accepted that the
theine in tea supplies best that which is lost to the system by the
wear and tear of life, the property termed caffeine in coffee being
identical with both, serving the same purpose. While Liebig suggests
that theine contributes to the formation of taurine, a compound
peculiar to bile, and Lehman found that its administration is followed
by a slight augmentation of urea. It has also been proven that theine
and quinine are similar in nature, and that on analysis these
substances are shown to contain the same proportions of carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, and, as is well known, quinine is
about the only remedy used in intermittent and malarial fevers and
ague. These facts being settled beyond dispute, it can be readily
understood why it is that tea is so soothing and beneficial to those
who may feel feverish, tired or debilitated. And while it is not claimed
that tea alone will cure fever and ague, it certainly acts as a
preventative.
In the early stages of fever it is found very valuable when given in
the form of a cold infusion, it being not only considered an excellent
diluent at the commencement, but also when administered in the
form of “a tincture,” prepared by macerating the leaves in proof spirit
and adding a teaspoonful of the mixture to a small cup of water. This
preparation is given to the patient at short intervals during the night,
after the acute symptoms have subsided, and is often of great
benefit during the latter stages. For this purpose, in hospitals and
other institutions, the leaves which have been used once for the
regular infusion, may be macerated in alcohol and a tincture of
sufficient strength obtained at a cheap and economical rate. In a
peculiar state of the brain, termed “sthenic excitement,” a condition
clearly bordering on inflammation, more especially when produced
by alcoholic stimulants, intense study or long-continued application
of the mind to any particular subject or literary research, an infusion
made from Green tea will quickly act as a salutary remedy. While, on
the contrary, in periods of diminished excitement, a morbid vigilance
and increased nervous disturbance is certain to follow its use, much
better results being produced by small quantities repeated than by
large ones in such cases.
In cases of poisoning by arsenic and antimony, fatal results have
been prevented by the prompt administration of a strong infusion of
tea, its power as an antidote in such cases depending on the tannin
decomposing the poisonous substances. While it is nearly as
valuable an antidote to poisoning by opium as coffee, it is, however,
only useful in combatting the secondary symptoms, and should
never be administered in such cases until the stomach pump or
other means have removed the opium from the stomach. In some
forms of heart disease, tea proves a useful sedative, while in others
it is positively injurious. Many cases of severe nervous headache are
instantly relieved by a cup of strong Green tea taken without the
addition of either milk or sugar, but should be only occasionally
resorted to in such cases, it being much better to avoid the cause.
The almost total absence of gouty and calculous diseases in China
and Japan is claimed to be attributable to the constant and
inveterate use of tea by the inhabitants of these countries, in
confirmation of which Prout says: “Persons of a gouty or rheumatic
nature, and, more especially, those prone to calculous diseases, will
find tea the least objectionable article of common drink, but should
use it without the addition of sugar and only very little milk. When the
water is hard, the addition of a small quantity of carbonate of soda
will improve the flavor of the tea at the same time, rendering it a
more proper beverage for persons so affected, but should not be
taken by them for at least four hours after any solid meal, the
addition of the alkali serving to increase the action of the skin as well
as to augment its cooling and refreshing properties in the fullest
degree.”
Dr. Smith alleges that “tea promotes all vital actions, the action of the
skin particularly being increased and that of the bowels lessened, the
kidney secretions are also affected, and the urine, perhaps,
somewhat diminished, the latter being uncertain.” Other recent
authorities agreeing that the direct effect of tea upon the human
system is to increase the assimilation of food, both of the heat-giving
and flesh-forming kinds, and that with an abundance of food it
promotes nutrition, while in the absence of sufficient food it increases
the waste of the tissues and body generally. An infusion of cold tea
has been known to check violent retching and vomiting, while a very
hot one will prove beneficial in severe attacks of colic and diarrhœa,
having a specific action on the kidneys and urine. An application of
infused tea leaves will subdue inflammation of the eyes produced by
cold or other causes, but should be applied only and allowed to
remain over night; and people who travel much will find a supply of
tea a valuable accompaniment, as it is found to improve the taste
and counteract the effects of the most brackish water, proving
efficient also in preventing the dysenteric and diarrhetic results
produced by the frequent and extreme changes of drinking waters. It
is for the purpose of qualifying the water expressly that tea is so
generally used in China, as very little good drinking water is to be
met with in any part of that country.
With brain-workers it has always been a favorite beverage, the
subdued irascibility, the refreshed spirits, and the renewed energies
which the student so often owes to it, have been the theme of many
an accomplished pen. Yet it is impossible to speak too strongly
against the not uncommon habit frequently adopted by ardent
students when prosecuting their studies far into the night, to resist
the claims of nature for repose, and keep off the natural sleepiness
by repeated libations of tea. That it answers the purpose for the time
being cannot be denied, but the object is often attained at a fearful
price, the persistent adoption of such a practice being certain to lead
to the utter destruction of the health and vigor of both body and
mind. Less injury in such cases will result from the use of coffee,
there being this difference between the morbid states of the nervous
system produced by coffee and that resulting from tea. The effect of
the former generally subsides or disappears entirely on relinquishing
its use, while that caused by tea is more permanent and often
incapable of being ever eradicated.
That tea does not suit all temperaments, constitutions and all ages is
no valid argument against its general use. That it is less adapted to
children than adults is admitted; indeed, for very young children it is
entirely improper, producing in them, like all narcotics, a morbid state
of the brain and nervous system in general. It is also unsuited to
those of an irritable temperament as well as for those of a leuco-
phlegmatic constitution, such persons illy bearing much liquid of any
kind, particularly in the evening, prospering best on a dry diet at all
times, and to which young children especially should be strictly
confined. Briefly it may be summed up that tea is best suited to
persons in health, the plethoric and sanguine, and upon which
principle it is the proper diet at the beginning of fevers and all
inflammatory complaints. Besides the more obvious effects with
which all who use it are familiar, tea saves food by lessening the
waste of the body, thus nourishing the muscular system while it
excites the nervous to increased activity, for which reason old and
infirm persons derive more benefit and personal comfort from its use
than from any corresponding beverage. To the question “does tea
produce nervousness?” the answer is “in moderation, emphatically
No!” One to two cups of tea prepared moderately strong, even when
taken two to three times per day will not make any one nervous, but
when drunk to excess it undoubtedly will. Tea-testers and experts
who are tasting it all the time, day in and day out, for the purpose of
valuing it, are frequently made nervous by it, soon recover by a little
abstinence. Tea, like liquor and drugs, when taken in moderate
quantities, produce one effect, but when used in large and
immoderate quantities produce just the contrary result. China and
Japan teas, containing more theine and less tannin, are
consequently less hurtful and more refreshing than India and Ceylon
teas, which contain nearly double the quantity of tannin, the
astringent property to which India and Ceylon teas owe the harsh,
bitter taste so often complained of in them, and which is undoubtedly
the unsuspected cause of the indigestion and nervousness produced
by their use.

DIETICAL PROPERTIES.
That the universal employment of tea has displaced many other
kinds of food is certain, and regarding its dietical properties much
has been written for and against. While some physicians have
praised its value as an article of food, on account of the large
proportion of nitrogen which it contains, others have as strenuously
maintained that it is non-nutritious, and does not serve as a
substitute for food, and that the only beneficial properties it contains
are due to the milk and sugar added in its use. So that in considering
the nourishing effects of tea, the nutriment contained in the milk and
sugar certainly must not be overlooked, neither must the powerful
influence of the heat of the steaming draught be forgotten. According
to the chemical classification of food, the “flesh formers” contained in
tea of average quality is about 18, and the “heat givers” 72 per cent.,
water and “mineral matter” being divided between the residue, the
several constituents as they are found in one pound of good tea
being as follows:—
FLESH FORMERS.
Constituents. Quantities, in one
pound of good Tea.
oz. grs.
Theine, 0. 210
Caseine, 2. 175
Volatile 0. 52
Oil,
Fat, 0. 280
Gum, 2. 385

HEAT GIVERS.
Sugar, 0. 211
Fibre, 3. 87
Tannin, 4. 87
Water, 0. 350
Mineral, 0. 350
—— ——
 Total, 15 267 grs.
oz.
The use of theine as an article of diet has not so far been
satisfactorily determined; but that it is a question of no mean interest
is obvious when we consider that it is found to exist in so many
plants, differing widely in their botanical origin and yet all instinctively
used for the same purpose, by remotely situated nations, for the
production of useful, agreeable and refreshing beverages.
By taking the normal temperature of the human body at 98°, it
follows that where food is taken into the stomach of a lower
temperature than that of the body it must necessarily abstract heat
from the stomach and surrounding tissues, so that where the
practice of taking cold food becomes habitual depression occurs and
the stomach is consequently disordered, and the system must make
good this heat lost in raising the temperature of cold food or else
suffer. The body demanding food when in an exhausted state, cold
food or drink makes an immediate drain upon the system for heat
before it can supply material for producing combustion, and the body
is thereby taxed to supply heat at a time when it is least fitted for it. It
is natural, therefore, that there should be a craving for warm food,
and as liquid food is deficient in heat-giving matter, the use of cold
drink is more injurious than that of cold food. From other experiments
it appears that the introduction into the stomach of three or four
grains of theine, which is the quantity contained in the third of an
ounce of good tea, has the remarkable effect of diminishing the daily
waste or disintegration of the bodily tissues which may be measured
by the quantity of solid constituents contained in the many
secretions, and if such waste be lessened the necessity for food to
repair that waste will obviously be decreased in corresponding
proportions. In other words, says Professor Johnstone, “by the
consumption of a certain quantity of tea daily the health and strength
of the body will be maintained to an equal degree upon a smaller
supply of ordinary food.” Tea, therefore, saves food; stands to a
certain extent in place of food, while at the same time it soothes the
body and enlivens the mind. While tea, according to Dr. Sigmond,
“has in most instances been substituted for spirituous liquors, and
the consequence has been a general improvement in the health and
morals of the people, the time, strength, and vigor of the human
body being increased by its use. It imparts greater capability of
enduring fatigue, and renders the mind more susceptible of the
innocent and intellectual pleasures of life, as well as of acquiring
useful knowledge more readily, being not only a stimulant to the
mental faculties but also the most beneficial drink to those engaged
in any laborious or fatiguing work.” Dr. Jackson testifying “that a
breakfast of tea and bread alone is much more strengthening than
one of beefsteak and porter.”
In his admirable work on hygiene Dr. Parker remarks that “tea
possesses a decidedly stimulating and restorative action on the
human system, no depression whatever following its use, the pulse
being a little quickened, and the amount of pulmonary carbonic acid
accordingly increased.” From this experiment he regards “tea as a
most useful article of diet for soldiers, the hot infusion being potent
against heat and cold, and more useful still in great fatigue in tropical
countries by its great purifying effect on brackish and stagnant
water.” Adding that “tea is so light, easily carried and so readily
prepared, that it should form the drink, par excellence, of the soldier
in service or on the march, above all its power of lessening the
susceptibility to malarial and other influences.” And Admiral Inglefield
is quoted as strongly recommending the use of tea to Arctic travelers
and explorers, as seamen who surveyed with him in the polar
regions after an experience of one day’s rum drinking came to the
conclusion that tea was more beneficial to them while undergoing
the severe work and intense cold. Under the infirmities of advancing
age, especially when the digestive powers become enfeebled and
the size and weight of the body begin perceptibly to diminish, the
value of tea in checking the rapid waste of tissue is particularly
observable, and persons, when very much fatigued, will be sooner
refreshed by drinking a cup of moderately strong, good tea, than by
drinking wine or spirits of any kind. In allaying or satisfying severe
thirst, no beverage will be found as efficacious as a draught of cold
tea.
Lettson furnishes a calculation, partly his own and partly from other
sources, in which he endeavors to prove how much is, in his view,
unnecessarily expended by the poor for tea. But the observations of
Liebig, if correct, and in all probability they are, offer a satisfactory
explanation of the cause of the partiality of the poorer classes, not
alone for tea, but for tea of an expensive and therefore superior
quality. “We shall never certainly,” he says, “be able to discover how
people were led to the use of hot infusions of the leaves of a certain
shrub (tea) or a decoction of certain roasted seeds (coffee); some
cause there must be which would explain how the practice has
become a necessary of life to whole nations.” But it is still more
remarkable that the beneficial effects of both plants on the health
must be ascribed to one and the same substance, the presence of
which in two vegetables belonging to natural families, the product of
different quarters of the globe, could hardly have presented itself to
the boldest imagination, recent research having shown in such a
manner as to exclude all doubt that the caffeine of coffee and the
theine of tea are in all respects identical. And without entering into
the medical action of this principle, it will surely appear a most
startling fact, even if we deny its influence on the process of
secretion, that this substance, with the addition of oxygen and the
elements of water, can yield taurine, the nitrogenous compound
peculiar to bile. So that if an infusion of tea contain no more than 1-
10 of a grain of theine, and contributes, as has been shown, to the
formation of bile, the action, even of a such a small quantity, cannot
be looked upon as a nullity. Neither can it be deemed that in the
case of non-atomized food or a deficiency of the exercise required to
cause a change of matter in the tissues, and thus to yield the
nitrogenized product which enters into the composition of bile, the
health may be benefited by the use of compounds essential to the
production of this important element of respiration. In a chemical
sense, and it is this sense alone that theine is in virtue of its
composition better adapted to this purpose than all other
nitrogenized vegetable principles yet discovered. To better prove
how the action of tea may be explained, we must call to mind that
the chief constituents of the bile contain only 3.8 per cent. of
nitrogen, of which only one-half belongs to the taurine. Bile contains