Short-lived newspapers: reassessing success and failure in the nineteenth-century press

短命的报纸：重新评估十九世纪报业的成功与失败

• 批准号: 2684684
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Edge Hill University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2684684
• 关键词: Short; lived; newspapers; reassessing; success

This collaborative PhD project aims to reassess what we understand as success and failure with regard to the nineteenth-century press, arguing that short-lived newspapers represent an important and critically overlooked sector. Newspapers were just one part of a rapidly expanding publishing industry, driven by new markets, developing technology and an evolving industrial economy and society. The orthodox view of the nineteenth-century press is too readily 'determined by what the newspaper became' in the twentieth. In other words, 'success' is associated primarily with the long-running, London-centred mass daily media, supplemented by local papers, most of which were launched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent work has begun to challenge this orthodoxy. George Brock, writing of the evolution of journalism as an endeavour subject to political, societal and legal developments, opines that 'periods of stability are the exception and not the rule.' This thesis will argue that the nineteenth century was characterised by fundamental instability which was reflected in its restless, constantly evolving print media; a business in which newspapers appeared, adapted, merged and disappeared in often bewildering numbers. Dismissing such a large proportion of this cultural phenomenon as a failure simplistically, on the sole basis of a short life in print, places historical scholarship in danger of misrepresenting the complexity of the newspaper press as experienced by the nineteenth-century reader. It is the aim of this project to seek to redress the balance by arguing for the place of short-lived papers in our understanding of the press.

这个合作博士项目旨在重新评估我们所理解的关于19世纪新闻界的成功和失败，认为短命的报纸代表了一个重要的，严重被忽视的部门。报纸只是迅速扩张的出版业的一部分，受新市场、发展中的技术以及不断发展的工业经济和社会的推动。对19世纪新闻界的正统看法太容易被20世纪的报纸所“决定”。换句话说，“成功”主要与长期运行的、以伦敦为中心的大众日报媒体有关，辅以地方报纸，其中大部分是在19世纪末和20世纪初推出的。最近的研究已经开始挑战这种正统观念。乔治•布洛克（George Brock）将新闻业的演变描述为一种受政治、社会和法律发展影响的努力，他认为“稳定时期是例外，而不是规律”。本文认为，19世纪的特点是根本不稳定，这反映在其不安的、不断发展的印刷媒体上；在这个行业中，报纸的出现、改编、合并和消失的数量往往令人眼花缭乱。仅仅因为报纸的出版时间很短，就简单地把这种文化现象的很大一部分视为失败，这将使历史学者面临歪曲19世纪读者所经历的报纸复杂性的危险。这个项目的目的是通过争论短命报纸在我们对新闻界的理解中的地位来寻求纠正这种平衡。