To secure this revenue stream proprietors had to convince their readers that their advertisements would reach a wide circle of potential readers. County papers expended considerable effort to create markets in towns and villages round about. Most papers maintained a standing arrangement with networks of booksellers or grocers where papers could be purchased and advertisements delivered for placement in the next paper; these addresses were usually listed on the final page. One of the most ambitious of these networks was that set out in The Gloucester Journal of 1725, which described thirteen divisions or circuits that carried the paper into twelve English and Welsh counties spread over an area of 11,000 square miles.48 The Gloucester Journal could be read in Glamorgan, in Ludlow in Shropshire, and as far away as Berkshire. In these farthest reaches The Gloucester Journal would be rubbing up against papers printed in other cities (most obviously Bristol and Birmingham) and the competition for advertising revenue was undoubtedly intense. Nowhere was this more the case than in London, with its numerous papers and journals. By the mid-eighteenth century the market for advertisements was itself beginning to segment, with different papers specialising in particular sub-markets: medical elixirs, theatre announcements, and so on.49 All sought to impress potential advertisers with their wide circulation, and, increasingly, the quality of their readership.
Map 3 The circulation network of the Gloucester Journal, 1725
It is in this context that one needs to see Addison and Steele's celebrated and much cited boast that each copy of The Spectator would be seen by twenty readers.50 The claim actually originates rather earlier, in The City Mercury in 1694, one of the London advertising papers.51 It is a multiplier frequently cited by scholars of the newspaper industry when calculating the impact and reach of eighteenth-century papers, but this is not what Addison intended. An, optimistic assessment, it was based on no systematic data, and was little more than a well-judged pitch for advertising business in a crowded market.52 As a generalisation on which to build calculations of readership it has little value.
Nevertheless such claims do point up the energy with which publishers pursued advertising, which played a crucial role in the development of the news industry not just in the most obvious sense of making marginal operations viable. We may identify, in addition, three consequences of long-term significance. Firstly, the inclusion of advertisements was an important way in which printed newspapers differentiated themselves from manuscript news-books.53 Until this time the two traditions had been utterly intermingled, mutually furnishing intelligence and copy, and serving overlapping readerships. But manuscript news services never included advertisements; and although they continued into the eighteenth century (robustly in places like France where newspaper publication remained more restricted),54 the two traditions now began to diverge more dramatically. In the eighteenth century, newspapers served far broader and more numerous clienteles, and finally developed as a self-consciously independent genre. The importance of advertising to this process is signalled by the developing practice of reserving the whole front page of a newspaper for advertising, rather than placing advertisements at the end. This had become the habitual practice of the London papers by the end of the eighteenth century (and in some cases would only be abandoned in relatively recent times).55
Secondly, by providing a robust income stream, advertisements brought closer the day when newspapers could hope to be self-financing, and furnish their editors with a decent income: perhaps ultimately the funds to employ additional staff. To this point, the publishing of newspapers had been almost always the enterprise of a single man, and this left little enough time or space for editorial creativity. In principle the rising financial returns from advertising revenue might over time encourage a tradition of genuine editorial independence. In the short term governments were too wary of the press to allow this to happen. It is surely relevant in this connection that the Stamp Act of 1712 imposed, in addition to the obligation of stamped paper, a swingeing fee for each advertisement. The precipitate fall in advertising revenue that inevitably followed was probably a greater cause of newspapers failing than the stamp itself.56
Finally, advertisements played an important role in humanising the press. The first papers were, as we have seen, rather clinical and distant. They offered a sequence of reports of overwhelmingly foreign news. The reader might be flattered to be incorporated into these previously closed circles of knowledge, but it was hard going. Advertisements brought the everyday lives of the local public directly into the reading experience of their fellow customers. They could marvel at the rich furnishings and clothing that citizens had somehow mislaid; empathise with the experience of unreliable servants; enjoy the wicked, guilty pleasure at the humiliated and exasperated husband forced to make a public declaration that he would no longer be responsible for his wife's debts.57
Readers could revel in these vignettes of chaotic and disturbed lives; they could feel the pain of those who had lost all their worldly goods by fire; they could wrestle with the conflicting emotions of incredulity and hope raised by advertisements for patent medicines. They could marvel at the villainy of fugitive criminals, whose crimes and physical characteristics were often described at some length, and they could share with anxious neighbours their fears that such villains could be lurking in the vicinity. It has been suggested that these crime reports, placed by the local authorities as advertisements, made a significant contribution to law enforcement at a time when policing was rudimentary and citizens were necessarily required to contribute to upholding public order.58 Certainly, in an age before the editorial, and where a large portion of the news continued in the hallowed tradition of the foreign despatches, these advertisements allowed papers to offer some echo of the vivacity and merriment purveyed by pamphlets and broadsheets. It is no accident that in the early eighteenth century, when the metropolitan news market was first embracing the culture of advertising, the circulation of The London Gazette, necessarily committed to a more conservative style of dry official announcements, fell precipitously.59 These scenes of everyday life and titillating visits to the darker reaches of society brought energy, variety and a hint of danger to the news. From this point on advertisements were a staple of the industry.
CHAPTER 15
From Our Own Correspondent
THERE can be no doubt that by the eighteenth century the reading public's appetite for news had generated a considerable industry. In Germany, the Low Countries and particularly England newspapers had captured the public imagination. In London a multiplicity of competing papers fuelled the poisonous politics of the age, and posed those in power unfamiliar problems of news management. But who exactly lay behind this vast increase in the weekly and sometimes daily output of news? Who provided the necessary continuous stream of copy?
It will not have escaped the attention of readers that so far we have met remarkably few of those involved in the actual writing of news. Most of the news men who have featured in these pages have been either the proprietors of manuscript news services, or authors who made their name through the publication of what were essentially advocacy pamphlets in serial form – men like Marchamont Nedham or Daniel Defoe. Most of the great journalists of the eighteenth century were either pamphleteers (Defoe and Swift) or wits (Addison and Steele). So although this was the age when the word ‘journalist’ was first coined, it did not yet describe an independent craft.
The word ‘journalist’ first made its way into the English language at the end of the seventeenth century: the first reported usage is 1693.1 But like the use of the German Zeitung two hundred years before, it did not yet have its modern meaning. A journalist was one who made his living from writing, but not necessarily for the newspapers. The implication was generally disparaging. When the essayist John Toland described the now scarcely known Lesley as a ‘journalist’ in 1710, he was referring scornfully to an emerging class of hired hack who wrote to order, sometimes copy for the newspapers, more often in partisan pamphlets. ‘The
y [the Tories] have one Lesley as their journalist in London, who for seven or eight years past did, three times a week, publish rebellion.’ The term was opprobrious and unstable. When Addison in The Spectator of 1712 referred to a female correspondent as a journalist, he meant someone who kept a journal or diary ‘filled with a fashionable kind of gaiety and laziness’. The coinage remained occasional. Jonathan Swift tried another variation, ‘journalier’, for newspaper writer, but this did not really catch on. At best the term, derived from the French journal ('newspaper'), and ultimately jour ('day'), represented a new emphasis on timeliness in the reporting of current affairs; a circumstance that in the politically charged atmosphere of turn-of-the-century London brought a promise of abundant opportunity for the aspiring writer not overburdened with scruples.
Grub Street
The first true news professionals were the purveyors of manuscript news services. They generally managed the whole business, building their reputation through collecting and redacting the news, and personally writing the master copy. The same was by and large true of the first generation of newspaper proprietors, who usually managed the whole editorial process single-handed. The most significant exception to this, right through to the end of the eighteenth century, was the busy London market. Here the weekly or bi-weekly news-sheets could sometimes afford to retain one or two staff reporters. This was a tenuous existence, and the jobbing news man would often make ends meet by working for more than one paper. This was not well-paid work. Even in regular employment it was scarcely possible to make more than a pound a week, the sort of money a printer paid to a trained compositor. A compositor was a vital part of the production process; at this point a reporter was not.
It is seldom possible to put a name or a face to these drones of the news industry. We normally meet them only through the hostile caricature of a sneering competitor. Thus Read's Journal wrote of the men who gathered news for Mist's:
[One] has a commission for scraping the jails in Middlesex and Surrey of their commitments; another has a warrant for scouring the ale-houses and gin-shops for such as die of excessive drinking. A person is posted at the Savoy to take up deserters; and another in the park to watch the motions of the guards and their military punishments.2
A pamphlet published on behalf of the coffee houses attacked news gatherers who would ‘hang and loiter about the public offices, like house-breakers, waiting for an interview with some little clerk’.3 This at least is plausible; less so the wild and gleeful suggestion of The Flying Post that to improve its coverage of domestic news The Universal Spectator had ‘settled fixed salaries of two pence per diem on a considerable number of antiquated herb women’.4 This is the savage sarcasm of an industry competitor, but it does point obliquely to an underlying truth: that women were becoming an essential element of the eighteenth-century news industry, if not as news writers then certainly in the distribution process.
15.1 The Three Champions. The writers Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe and George Ridpath, here denounced for their partisanship and political connections.
In truth the professional infrastructure of news in the eighteenth century – those regularly involved on a paid basis in the industry – was much more concerned with distribution than the generation of copy. From the point that the manuscript text of an issue left the proprietor's hand a substantial company of business associates and casual employees was required to deliver the newspaper to the reader's hands. The copy went first to the print shop to be set up in type, and from there to booksellers or wholesalers, for distribution through a whole network of street-sellers. This sales force ensured the papers were delivered to subscribers, or sold copies on the streets. In London, during the early years of the eighteenth century, the wholesale trade had fallen almost entirely into the hands of female publishers known as ‘Mercury women’. Elizabeth Nutt and her daughters owned several bookshops in the heart of London in the 1720s; they were responsible for distributing, through their network of hawkers, The Daily Post, The London Journal and The London Evening Post.5 Mercury women were often the wives or widows of established printers, so they could rely on a wide network of contacts. Many of their hawkers were also female. These humble and often near indigent day labourers were a constant source of concern for government authorities, particularly when they were thought to be distributing seditious material or opposition newspapers.6 When in 1728 the government attempted to stifle Mist's Weekly Journal, twenty-four people were arrested, including two Mercury women and the hawker Judith Salmon. A similar attempt to silence the radical politician John Wilkes thirty-five years later led to forty-nine arrests.7 The numbers who were making a living from the press in this way were very considerable. And these, we must remember, were enterprises where the journalistic content was essentially the responsibility of one individual. If there was, in this age, the beginnings of a newspaper industry, it relied far more on the artisans of the trade than on a new profession of career news writers.
Booksellers had a slightly schizophrenic relationship with hawkers, denouncing them as competitors who did not bear any of the usual fixed costs of running a bookshop, but then making use of them to distribute their own stock. By the last decades of the eighteenth century it required fifty hawkers to carry the copies of a single issue of the Amsterdamsche courant around town: however lowly, they were an indispensable part of the industry.8 But hawkers could also play a role, seldom appreciated, in the evolution of a newspaper's style and market position. They knew better than most what sort of news encouraged casual sales, particularly at the lower end of the market, since for them a good pitch was the difference between a full belly and going hungry. By reporting back what stories went down well they could help a canny publisher shape his publishing strategy. It may have been this sort of relationship which The Flying Post had in mind in its reference to The Universal Spectator’s herb women.
These ill-natured jibes come from the first exuberant growth of competing papers in the early part of the eighteenth century; as the business model became more secure, and the proportion of space devoted to domestic news mounted, papers could invest rather more in news gathering. In the 1770s the editor of The Gazetteer listed fourteen correspondents who were paid for contributions, including information from the City, the Law Courts, and the shipping news.9 These were not yet members of staff, and as casual workers they were free to work for more than one paper; but this was definitely a change from a century before, when the correspondents of Williamson's news service had been customs officials and postmasters, supplying news as an (unpaid) adjunct to their normal duties.10 Note, too, that these informants were by and large local stringers operating in the metropolis. Few if any papers would maintain a correspondent abroad, relying instead on the traditional and highly effective services of the manuscript newsletters and foreign newspapers for their foreign news. Paying the subscriptions for these services could of course add up to a considerable financial outlay.
Considered in the round, an eighteenth-century newspaper business dis-pensed a remarkably small proportion of its outlay on writers. Few newspapers felt the need to secure the exclusive services of the men who wrote for them. The special skills of old lags who snuffled about the court house to root out a story were no doubt appreciated, but such low characters could never expect their efforts to be openly acknowledged. The concept of a journalist as an informed observer with specialist expertise had yet to be invented. No papers carried reports from named journalists writing under their own byline. The tradition of anonymity inherited from the manuscript newsletter cast a long shadow, to the frustration of anyone ambitious to make their name through the burgeoning press. In 1758 Ralph Griffith, founder of the Monthly Review, painted a bitter portrait of the life of the man who wrote for hire. ‘There is no difference between the writer in his garret and the slave in the mines. Both have their tasks assigned them alike: both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for deliverance.’11 Griffith thought that if all the writers were to
withdraw their labour the sudden disappearance of the papers and journals would bring the reading public to some appreciation of their skills; needless to say, the call fell on deaf ears. Revealingly, although ‘journalist’ had made its hesitant debut in the English language by the end of the seventeenth century, ‘journalism’, describing the trade of writing, is not known until 1833, 140 years later.12
Not Quite a Gentleman
Even in this grudging employment of piecework news gatherers, the London papers were very much the exception. Elsewhere in Europe (and elsewhere in England) a large proportion of newspapers were essentially produced single-handed until the end of the eighteenth century. The publisher or editor would gather the copy from manuscript news-sheets and other newspapers, and deliver it to the printer. He would supervise the network of hawkers or carters that brought the papers to their readers. He would maintain and chase up subscriptions and solicit advertising. Sometimes, notwithstanding this overwhelming miscellany of tasks, the newspaper was not his exclusive occupation. In some English towns the newspaper was published by the local printer, elsewhere often by a man who simultaneously ran a bookshop. In Germany, and later in colonial America, it was common for the local postmaster to be proprietor of the local newspaper, exploiting his privileged first access to the foreign despatches, and relying on the fact that potential customers would routinely drop by his premises.
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