The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (57 page)

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
:

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’.
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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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.

This extraordinarily busy life left little time for activities we associate with journalism: the searching out or development of stories, research and crafting of articles. Composition of the weekly issue would continue up to the last minute, but to set a whole issue of a thousand copies printed on a single press demanded that the composition of the text began almost as soon as the last issue was complete. Advertisements or letters held over from the previous week could be set up first, but publishers were aware that it was for news that subscribers bought their paper, and they would only tolerate so many thin issues before cancelling an order. ‘I desire you to erase out my name from among the number of your subscribers,’ wrote a reader of
The British Spy
in December 1728, ‘unless in your next you give me a just reason for the barrenness of your intelligence.’
¹³
So while it was tempting for proprietors to increase revenue with several columns of advertisements, they could only go so far. Letters and other contributed pieces could not be allowed to crowd out news. As Samuel Johnson correctly remarked, writing for the first issue of
The London Chronicle
(January 1757), ‘The first demand made by the reader of a journal is that he should find an accurate account of foreign transactions and domestic incidents.’
¹⁴

For foreign news, which continued to claim first place in every newspaper, publishers were entirely dependent on traditional sources. Few could afford to maintain paid correspondents in any foreign city. Working with limited resources and under severe time constraints, their regular weekly issue was in its way a marvel of creation; a tribute to ingenuity and the dense network of communication that brought news from Lyon to Berlin, and Vienna to Birmingham. But the urgency of deadlines left little time for reflection. Eighteenth-century newspapers are striking for an absence of design innovation. Such advances as we see in the creative use of white space and ruling to separate different items are slow and incremental. Virtually no use is made of headlines, or of illustration, beyond small woodcuts of ships to identify the
shipping news. The order of news was determined largely by external factors: that is, the order in which reports were received in the shop. There was no guarantee that the most important items would appear first, or even on the first page.

Newspapers continued, by and large, to steer clear of editorial comment. This was particularly true of papers published in towns where theirs was the only newspaper. Since this was the case in the vast majority of places that boasted a newspaper in eighteenth-century Europe, the contentious press of London was very much the exception. But occasionally a newspaper man rose above the anonymity of the everyday to espouse a cause. Such a man was Andrew Brice of Exeter, editor of
Brice's Weekly Journal
. In 1726 he was moved to protest against the dire conditions endured by inmates of the West Country prisons. Having fired his opening salvo in a pamphlet
Appeal for Justice
, Brice was contacted by several prisoners held in Exeter prison, and he used the columns of his paper to publicise their plight. Matters came to a head when a confined merchant made specific accusations against the Keeper of the Exeter prison, George Glanvill. Glanvill sued Brice, and although Brice pleaded his cause in the
Weekly Journal
, the case went against him. Unable to pay a fine of £103, the editor absconded. The story ends badly, and there is little doubt that the stalwart citizens of Devon would have stood stoutly behind the officers of the law rather than the quixotic defender of the rights of felons. A man ahead of his time, Brice was a rare example of a type that later generations would come to honour: the campaigning journalist.
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