The English Press: A History by Jeremy Black

BLACK, Jeremy – The English Press: A History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 184 During the summer of 1966, when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson flew to Moscow to take part in peace talks over the Vietnam War and England’s football team won the World Cup, the Beatles claimed another number one record with Paperback Writer. The song’s lyrics mentioned its protagonist’s job on the Daily Mail, then selling around two million copies a day. It is an example Black uses to place the English newspaper within a cultural paradigm, something that is a running theme throughout his book. Its significance is one that has been overlooked in past histories of the press, but here plays a central role in the author’s survey of the English press from the seventeenth century right up to date in 2019. Throughout this period, Black stresses that the history of the press does not exist in a vacuum, but is rather what he calls an “aspect of a broader transformation in society, culture and politics,” (p. ix) something which continues today with the advent of social media and the threat it presents for the future of print journalism. One of the key strengths of the book is the way in which it engages with the many problems that newspapers face today while highlighting that the history of the press in England is simultaneously the history of challenges and changes that have created an “unsettled trajectory” (p. 1). In other words, the printed newspaper occupies a position within a public space that helps us understand the development of the spheres of politics, economics, and culture over the past four centuries in a way that allows us to examine the self-image of England and the development of a liberal society. After a brief chapter on the origins of print, the book begins with a survey of the years 1696-1750 in which the author offers a concise and well formulated survey of the ancestry of today’s newspapers, providing an interesting Darwinian argument in which he suggests that just as history is said to be written by the winners, the growth of the English newspaper and its eventual success is built, at least in part, on a number of titles that were evolutionary dead ends. Short-lived newspapers came and went as owners searched for the right form and format to engage readers and attempt to gain some level of financial stability. As a result, the commercial imperative for success engendered an awareness of the importance of marketing which eventually led to the modernization of the press in the first half of the nineteenth century. Touching on one of the book’s most perceptive points of the press’s cyclical nature, Black notes that the Times’ move to a steam-powered flat-bed press in 1814 prefigured the new production facilities at Wapping in 1986 in the way the 1814 machinery was “secretly prepared to prevent the opposition of workers” (p. 77). The book is particularly strong in the way in which it often foregrounds not just the development of a national press but also that of regional newspapers. Remarking how 1855 saw the launch of the first regional dailies, including those in cities such as Sheffield and Birmingham, Black notes that even in the second half of the nineteenth century newspapers understood the importance of self-promotion, something evidenced by the publication of titles such as J. D. Leader’s Seventy-Three Years of Progress: A History of the Sheffield Independent 1819 to 1892 (1892). In a later chapter, he highlights the sometimes overlooked fact that despite continuing cuts to both budgets and staff, and the all too frequent situations where press releases are merely cut and pasted into print (something Nick Davies highlighted so well in Flat Earth News [2008]), regional newspapers continue to cover stories of local interest and concern, as in case of the Sheffield Telegraph, which “provide[d] good coverage” (p.162) of the 2018 controversy in which the city council removed many trees. Throughout, the book offers a detailed yet concise history of the English press. It is particularly impressive in the way it touches on...

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