Technology, Distribution and Editorial Control: their Interactions in the Evolution of Journalism

Abstract

The newspaper and the novel were the first cultural forms to emerge directly from printing; they were both essentially publishing phenomena and developed in England in the aftermath of the expiration in 1695 of the Licensing Act when printers, no longer limited in numbers by statute, were free to flourish — or perish — according to the behaviour of the market.¹ Journalism has thus a similar relationship to printing as pop music to the phonograph or the film to photography: it depends upon an industrial activity, it involves the creative individual as a worker within a fairly complex process of manufacturing and distribution. The journalism is, as it were the ‘software’ supplied to fill the ‘hardware’ of the newspaper system, and it thus serves as a pioneer example of the working of modern mechanical media. Unfortunately the newspaper is only now beginning to be studied historically as a media system;² most of those interested in the history of the press have been hitherto concerned with the newspaper either as a component of ‘Whig’ history, concentrating on those elements which illustrate the great tide of public freedom swelling from the eighteenth century onwards,³ or else as a component of a kind of ‘Whiggism-in-reverse’, bringing out those elements which illustrate the increasing amiseration or exploitation of the new mass readership.⁴

Published originally as chapter 7 in James Curran et al. (eds), Mass Communication and Society (London: Edward Arnold/Open University Press, 1977).