The Newspaper Press: Its Origin - Progress - and Present Position: Volume 1

The Newspaper Press: Its Origin - Progress - And Present Position by James Grant. This sweeping historical narrative traces English journalism from its earliest antecedents—Acta Diurna in Rome and early Italian gazettes—through the inchoate 'news letters' of the 16th and 17th centuries to the first printed newspapers in Britain. Grant surveys how ‘news’ evolved from mere intelligence to printed journals, the role of Butter, the Notable 'Weekly News', and the mercurial era of the 1640s–1650s, the licensing era after the Restoration, and the London Gazette’s monopolies. The book then charts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century expansion of the press, the advent of the first daily papers, the birth of the Tatler, Spectator, and other periodicals, and the long competition among city papers—Morning Chronicle, Public Advertiser, Courier, Times, and Morning Herald. It emphasizes taxation, such as stamp duties, and prosecutions for libel that shaped editorial policy, as well as the emergence of parliamentary reporting and the mechanization of printing. Interwoven are portraits and anecdotes of journalists, editors, poets, dramatists, and novelists who writ for the press, making The Newspaper Press a remarkable social and political history of English journalism.