Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first half of the nineteenth century, what were the economic circumstances of a successful Toronto newspaper shop?What were the typical expenses of such a shop and what kind of revenue could a proprietor expect from such an undertaking?These are difficult questions because, unfortunately, account books, ledgers, or a set of printers' papers for Toronto newspaper proprietors either have not survived or are incomplete.A portrait of the economic context must be pieced together from scattered records for Toronto offices and from information in the newspapers themselves, and then compared to documentation for shops in other towns.In order to conduct this analysis I created a hypothetical account book for a typical Toronto shop in the first half of the nineteenth century.In the discussion of this account book, I will first explore the expenses -equipment, supplies, and labour for a typical year, and then outline the revenue for a shop proprietor.From 1798 to 1845, thirty-two newspapers were launched in Toronto.Seventeen of these survived less than five years: ten endured less than one year, another four less than two years and another three less than five years.Of the 15 newspaper shops that functioned for five or more years, a number suffered financial difficulties.Although a newspaper enterprise was a serious business in Toronto, it was also a precarious undertaking, as explained by a contemporary Montreal journalist:Any individual is at liberty to commence a publication when and where he pleases; but it is one thing to issue a prospectus and another to establish a journal, particularly in a district where there are many existing....The risk is great and the chances are much against a new publication ... for a considerable outlay is certain, while a return of that outlay is equally uncertain."I
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".