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

这个合作的博士项目旨在重新评估我们对19世纪报业的成功和失败的理解，认为短暂的报纸代表着一个重要的、被严重忽视的部门。报纸只是迅速扩张的出版业的一部分，受到新市场、不断发展的技术和不断发展的工业经济和社会的推动。19世纪报业的正统观点太容易被20世纪报纸的面貌所决定。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，辅之以地方报纸，这些报纸大多是在十九世纪末和二十世纪初创办的。最近的研究已经开始挑战这一正统观点。乔治·布罗克认为，新闻业的发展受到政治、社会和法律发展的制约。他认为，稳定时期是例外，而不是规律。这篇论文将论证，十九世纪的特点是根本的不稳定，这反映在其永不停歇、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困惑。将这种文化现象的很大一部分简单地斥为失败，仅仅基于印刷业的短暂寿命，将历史学者置于歪曲19世纪读者所经历的报纸新闻的复杂性的危险之中。这个项目的目的是通过论证短期报纸在我们对新闻的理解中的位置来寻求纠正平衡。

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.