The Birth of the Mass Circulation of the Press in the 19th Century

Britain in the 19th century was home to the industrial revolution and, as in all areas, there was significant innovation in the production of newspapers, which had until then remained virtually unchanged from the Gutenberg press. The Times plays a central role in this innovation as the first purchasers of Frederic Koenig and Andrew Bauer's steam-driven printing press in 1814. In the 29^th November 1814 issue of The Times, the first to be printed by the new method, it is described as being “almost organic” and “the greatest invention connected with the printing press since the discovery of the art itself”. Koenig & Bauer's press could print over 1100 pages in an hour.

Another innovation in printing would come later in 1843 when Richard M. Hoe, an American inventor, created the world's first rotary printing press, which allowed for the printing of millions of copies a day. The first rotary press in Britain appears to have been made in the office of The Times by Ambrose Applegarth in 1847. The rotary printing press is still in use today.

With regards to the spread of news, an important development was the new overland route from Britain to India via Egypt, created by Thomas Fletcher Waghorn. The new route cut the journey's length from 16,000 miles (overseas) to 6000 miles (overland). What was a 3-month journey by the best mail steamer in 1825 could be undertaken in just 47 days by 1834. Waghorn's route helped speed the delivery of news from around the world. In turn, newspapers could publish more at a faster pace as world news came in at an unprecedented rate. This was especially important for merchants, to whom information on the fluctuations of market prices across the world was highly valuable.

On top of this, the telegram had begun to be incorporated in the acquisition of news, first by The Times and then by other newspapers, including, of course, The Daily Telegraph, whose name is a testament to its importance in transmitting news. The spread of newspapers was accelerating: on 11^th December 1849, thanks to advancements in both the railway and the telegraph, 150 copies of The Times were delivered at 1:30 PM in Paris on the same day as publication.

The so-called 'tax on knowledge' was a tax imposed by the British government on all newspapers in 1712. By 1815, they were being taxed at 4d (4 pence) a copy. Most people could not afford newspapers, which were priced at 6d or 7d, limiting their readership and growth. This changed in 1855 when the tax was repealed, allowing newspapers to price themselves more competitively and giving rise to many new daily publications, including the The Daily Telegraph, The Morning Star and the Manchester Guardian (which hitherto had been a weekly paper).

Mowbray Morris, a journalist of the era, said that “there is no reason why a daily newspaper should not be published for one penny with a moderate profit,” but that “it is impossible to produce a first-class paper at that price.” The Telegraph and Standard, both one-penny papers, would prove him wrong, becoming respectable newspapers in their own right with quality rivalling the expensive Times. By the 1860s, The Times had a readership of 50,000, and the Telegraph a readership of 30,000.

Sources

• The History of the Times, Vol. II, The Tradition Established
• The March of Journalism: The Story of the British Press from 1622 to the Present Day, Harold Herd (1952)
• http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRknowledge.htm
• http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/196806/mr.waghorn.s.route.to.india.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_printing_press
• Notes on the History of Science and Technology in London, David Singmaster

How Far We've Come

So in yesterday's HCJ lecture we had a brief run over the history of human development, beginning around 8000 BC with the earliest known civilisations and ending with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. What strikes me most, going over my notes, is seeing half a page's worth of my timeline dating between 8000 BC and 1400 AD, and only two pages detailing the time from 1440 (the Gutenberg press) to 1815. It never ceases to amaze me just how radically we've progressed - I find it difficult to process just how much the world has changed. A thousand years ago, the average man would have been lucky to live past 40; they'd be uneducated, illiterate and knowledge was passed via word of mouth. You would be living a life little different from the life your ancestors led a thousand years ago. Today? Today, a man can anonymously ask the entire world for help whilst trapped in a toilet after crapping himself at work.

...We've come a long way.

Every logged Iraq war death logged on a map

The quote commonly attributed to Stalin goes, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic," and it's sadly true. The humanity of a tragedy is diminished as it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine and empathise with a massive death count. 

So this map by the Guardian is exceptional. Every dot represents a death - or multiple deaths, where bombs have gone off. Click on a dot and you'll get the details. Not every death can be blamed on US/UK troops, but the vast majority would not have ever occurred had we never invaded. It's casualties like you'd imagine of any war, but graphed as they have been here, every death is humanised, and not some vague statistic. Just some food for thought.

WINOL Bulletin Crit #2

• The clip cuts to the street performer on the high street a couple seconds before the reporter gets to the subject of the high street, while still talking about the charity funding cuts. It's noticeable because the street performer has absolutely no relation to the story until the reporter contextualises it ("In comparison, the redevelopment of Winchester high street...").
• Why is Harry Verney interviewed in front of the vending machine? The background noise from the multimedia centre is also distracting - particularly the Windows log on sound effect. The interview is cut very abruptly, too, while Verney is still speaking (this is true of Michele Price's interview as well).
• "...but at least the streets are clean," probably wasn't meant to come across as sarcastic, but it did, giving the news report a biased slant.
• During Eleanor Bell's interview, she says that "as you know, Winchester's got a one-way system in the middle," at which point we're shown a van turning a corner. The small clip doesn't give any impression of a one-way system. I think the clip should have at least included a one-way sign, or a greater view of one of the one-way roads just by the high street. As it is, it's just a van turning a corner. 
• In Stuart Applebee's piece to the camera, he was standing very close to the camera and at an odd angle.
• I think it was a combination of bad audio, camera angle and lack of any physical acknowledgement of his presence, but Claire's "Thanks very much Tom," at the end of the sports report seemed oddly distant.
• I had a problem with the order of the news. The spending review has dominated the news for the last month and is one of the biggest issues politically, economically and socially. Why was it second in the bulletin after the charity fundings cut? I also think the news could have been ordered better. The bulletin begins with local news, goes to national news with the spending review, cuts to a court report, and then back to the spending review. I think a better order would have been:
1. Spending reviews
2. Rising tax fairs
3. Charity funding cuts
4. Convicted paedophiles
• This would have made more sense, organised by topic and importance/relevancy to viewers.

Overall, it's a big improvement to last week's. I know I haven't praised anything, but you can safely assume that what I haven't fussed about, I enjoyed.

Locke's Empiricism

After the great focus on Descartes and his ideas - the most relevant of them being that our mind is God-given and contains innate knowledge of God - Locke has been a rather large break away from his idealism. Locke had a number of ideas that I'll recap, but the first, still fresh in my mind after the lengthy discussion in our seminar, is tabula rasa: the idea that everyone is born a blank slate - Locke calls us 'white paper' - and that everything we know and believe is given to us through our physical senses. It's clear why he was not welcome during James II's brief, four-year rule, as with this single idea he contradicts the fundamental Christian idea of 'Original Sin' - basically, that all of us are born tainted due to Adam & Eve's crime against God's Will.

Tabula rasa makes a lot of sense to me. Locke, in his writings, challenges the reader to give him one thought that has not been drawn from some experience or another. My own, slightly different take to Locke's challenge would be to ask of someone to create a purely original image. By this I mean an image that is 100% new, taking nothing from anything and having no comparable properties to anything we know. Try to imagine an alien - not just some animal, but a creature with the capacity to think equal to humans. It can't be humanoid. It also can't be some space-cockroach either. And it can't have legs or arms or a head and supports its body in an entirely different way to any creature on earth. Its skin is a colour you've never perceived and its texture has never been felt before. It can't be classified under any label we have created for the animal kingdom. It bears no similarities to mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians, insects, arthropods. It does not adhere to the dichotomy of vertebrate/invertebrate.

I can broadly describe this alien creature, but I could never be more specific about it. I can't describe what this creature is, because it's beyond my imagination and most likely, yours too (if you can picture it though, I'd like to see what you come up with). My point is that we can only picture things when they have a basis in the reality we've experienced. Even in the case of this theoretical creature, I could only describe its impossibility by saying what it isn't like - it just isn't possible to have a thought not rooted in the observable world. To use more relatable examples, this is why a privileged person can never fully understand the hardships of those less fortunate, why the capitalist may call the poor lazy if they cannot improve their situation or why, even knowing that people have different tastes, we may still be boggled when someone hates our favourite food. It can be difficult to relate to people when our personal realities are so far apart.

To put it simply, the idea of tabula rasa supports the fact that each of us has a different reality, built of experiences unique to us, and that we cannot perceive something beyond what we have experienced. In that way, tabula rasa forms the basis of empiricism. It would also explain why cultures are so different - surely, if the knowledge of God was innate, then there would only be a single religion the world over? The first men to land in America would have been greeted by Christian brethren, and surely there would be no conflict of interest between Christians, Jews and Muslims, who all believe in the same God? Tabula rasa gives an explanation to such diversity that Descartes's ideology denies.

I think it'd be true to say that if we take the very best of Descartes and Locke - that is, doubting everything and requiring empirical evidence of everything - we end up with the scientific method, which is highly relevant to journalism as it is, at its core, about searching for truth.

Moving on from tabula rasa, Locke's other idea was a new take on the social contract. Hobbes had already laid the foundations down in his Leviathan, explaining that in a theoretical state of nature that existed before government, societies would collectively decide to give up all their rights for a leader and in return for their loyalty, be given safety and prosperity. Hobbes' look is highly cynical and put into practice, gives us dictatorship. Locke finds this irrational, question men would "take care to avoid mischeif of foxes... then are devoured by lions." The lions being, of course, these dictators. He suggests instead that in a state of nature, humans would enjoy their natural freedom and live in harmony with one another, and that government is created for the purpose to govern over the people's right of property.


A third idea of Locke's is that every man has the right to life, liberty and property, an idea that would have gone down well with the founders of America, though communists would be less than thrilled with his idea of property as a right. He states that the government and law should be there to protect, mainly, the one's right to their property. He also states that the public must agree on the taxes levied - which I think also goes against Machiavellian politics, as it suggests that the government must be liked and accepted by the citizens. His final idea is that of the right to revolution should the government cease to respect the law or their three rights, a rather dangerous idea that could only have been acceptable in the light of the Glorious Revolution that removed King James II.


It's easy to see Locke's philosophical influence in today's culture. We consider today that life and freedom are two of our most fundamental rights as human beings and have these ideals protected by the Human Rights Act. We no longer even live in a society with capital punishment - even the vilest crooks have a right to live, if locked away from the outside world. And we wouldn't be where we are now had it not been for the enlightenment and the rise of science, which is thoroughly grounded in empiricism, Locke's most important ideal.

Day at the Court

So last Tuesday we visited the court. It was a fair bit more entertaining than I expected, though perhaps not as exciting as I could have wished. Admittedly, my only previous experience with the court are the Ace Attorney games on the Nintendo DS, where common practice is to interject testimonies and rebuttals with a yell of "OBJECTION!!" , throw steaming hot coffee at the opposition's face, and celebrate a Not Guilty verdict with an explosion of confetti supplied by the police force.

Needless to say, the reality is a bit different.

After a bit of meandering through town, we found the court just off the high street. It was big and imposing from the outside, as these sorts of places tend to be, and on the inside, far too empty. After passing through security and briefly getting lost, we found and seated ourselves in the public gallery of, if I remember correctly, Court Room 4.

It was pretty scarce up there. Besides our party of six, there was a trio of law students (I assume they were law students) who had arrived just before us, and they had taken the good seats. Sitting in the farthest back row, my view was obscured. The others say they could see the defendant and claimant (is that the right term here?) from where they were seated, but from where I sat I could barely see the defence attorney putting his arguments forth without leaning forward and tilting my head to an uncomfortable angle. I'm not sure if there were any court reporters there, either. if they were there, they were out of my sight.

I know we're not supposed to look at the jury, lest our eyes lock and my biased, plebeian views sets prejudice in their minds, but I couldn't help myself. They were as diverse a bunch as I could've expected. There was the Focused One, absorbing all the information and speedily penning it down; the Organised One with her various folders and notepads - no doubt all colour coded - laid out in front of her; the Empty Space, which sat in for someone who couldn't care less about this court business* and, my favourite of all, That One Guy - and there's always one - who just doesn't give a crap what anyone thinks, leaning forwards, hands cupping face, elbows set on the desk before him and leaning into the desk space of his neighbours, unabashedly taking a nap. Every so often he would straighten up, open his eyes as wide as possible, slap a hand over his mouth in a desperate attempt to stifle a yawn and concentrate for a few minutes before sleep inevitably overpowered him once more.

*Or so I initially thought, anyway - turns out one of the jurors had to be removed due to personally knowing someone involved.

I suppose I'm in no position to mock the guy, though. I had to strain to make out what the judge said and the prosecution lawyer's words all seemed to mesh together into one - eventually I gave up and began amusing myself by inspecting the wooden walls and ceiling, which I found far more interesting than I ought to have. I did pay attention when the forensics experts came up to discuss the evidence, though. I did find their science to be fascinating, and actually I kind of wish I'd taken notes, since now I can't really remember much about it.

We sat and observed for an hour, then quietly left. Overall it was quite interesting. We got to see how the court works, and it did make me revise over McNae's to make sure nothing I'd written was in contempt of the court, and I think I've deleted anything contentious I'd written, though if I haven't I'm sure Chris or Brian will be quick to slaughter me for it. I think the case is over by now which would remove the problems, but I'm not entirely sure either. Still it was a fun day, and if not for the court, I would not have discovered the magical wonderland that is Pizza Hut. The weekday buffet was spectacular.

Court reporting is a dying art, says Guardian

The article by the Guardian can be found here. I began a trawl of the online newspapers looking for an update on a court case that caught my eye two weeks ago (that of the Saudi prince who had murdered his servant) and found something quite relevant to all of us in this article, especially as the idea that court reporters are the eyes and ears of the public has had a large presence in all our lectures. It's worth having a quick look if for no other reason than because it's by David Banks, who co-wrote McNae's.

The basic gist of the article is that a combination of 'churnalism' keeping journalists tied to their desks and the expected closure of 103 magistrate and 54 county courts is making it increasingly difficult for journalists to report on court proceedings - and what is the point of a verdict if the work of justice cannot be seen to be done? Perhaps this helps to explain why today's Independent had a disappointing total of zero court reports (rather disappointing for me when I was attempting to change my bad habits of reading the papers after lectures, and instead go into the classroom with a couple up-to-date court cases in my mind).

Descartes' Philosophy

The Renaissance was not a revolution of new thoughts, but rather a discovery of old ones. So it is Descartes' complete thrusting aside of old thought, both of medieval and antiquated times that mark the beginning of the modern era. His quote, cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am," helped give birth to individualistic philosophy as, at its heart, it seperates the individual from all other things - society, class and religion in particular - and places this individual at the centre of things.

I think it was confusion that led Descartes to his revelation: neither education nor experience gave him clarity on anything, as philosophies and cultures conflicted so radically from one place to another. "I think, therefore I am," is a universal truth, and the one thing we can be sure about. Descartes doubted everything, discarding everything that could be doubted, until he came to doubt his own existence. Descartes proves his existence with the phrase "I think, therefore I am," which states that if he did not exist, he would not be able to question his own existence, and so therefore, as he thinks to question his existence, he must exist.

Descartes was quite a revolutionary thinker. He broke free from the fixation philosophy up until then had had with the antiquated ideas of Aristotle and Plato and pushed forward this new philosophy which I think is still, to some extent, relevant in today's very individualistic society. That's not to say his philosophy was perfect, because there were certainly some very large holes in them. His proof of God's existence does not really fit in with the individualistic ideology and seems to me more like he was trying to reconcile his newfound ideas with his own beliefs and avoid the Church's wrath, and his ideas on the seperation of mind & body and humans & animals can be easily proved wrong with modern science.

His idea, that our God-given mind will never betray us whilst our body and senses may does not really stand when we cannot even prove that the 'mind' exists - to the best of our knowledge, thoughts are the result of reactions going on in the brain between two or more neurons. Where does body end and mind begin? Not to mention that our perceptions of such things vary between individuals. If I saw a cat from the corner of my eye, then turned to face it and discovered it was a bag instead, I would think that, as what I see is my brain's interpretation of visual data it receives from my eyes, my mind has deceived me, but Descartes would surely say that his eyes deceived him. He claims also that we are seperate from animals due to our minds, whilst they are 'automata' - biological machines and nothing more. But it's been proven that cats dream in their sleep, and observed that orangutans use primitive tools to hunt. Human consciousness and ingenuity isn't unique - just a step ahead of the rest of the animal kingdom.

Descartes had one brilliant idea, which is that "I think, therefore I am," and we can look to him as the very beginning of modern philosophy and outlooks on life, but I don't think he quites fits in modernity - though he doesn't fit in with the Renaissance (antiquated) philosophy either. I think he's somewhere in between the two ways of thought, and it's not until Locke and Newton introduce us into the philosophy of empiricism and the age of science that a relateably modern outlook can be found.

WINOL Bulletin

We watched the latest bulletin in our introduction to Journalism Now and asked to critique what we saw. So...

• I found the bar that rolls in with the interviewee's name and details to disappear too fast. I drifted away for one moment and completely missed the information - it was barely there for two seconds.
• The audio quality really deteriorated at the end of the piece on the international student ID problems at the part with the computer on the NUS site.
• The camera/audio cuts off one interviewed student ("I wouldn't know where to get the money from, I really wouldn't") mid-speech.
• This might sound very nit-picky but when the quote by Steve Brine came on-screen with the reporter reading it over. I can read the text in my head faster than she can read it out loud, and once I'd finished reading my attention wavered while I waited for the reporter to complete it. Perhaps it would've been better if you'd shown half the quote at a time, fading out the first half and bring in the second as the reporter reads it. It could keep our visual attention.
• I felt like the piece about the Queen was slightly out of place. I think it could been made more interesting had there been more information. Is there anything special or unique about the ship, besides being named after the Queen?
• The sports reporters didn't sound very enthusiastic about the matches they covered.
• It's 'Eastleigh' and 'Christchurch'.
• For some reason, and I don't know nearly enough about cameras and editing to be able to explain why, I found the cuts during the presenters' segments to be extremely jarring.

That's not to say I didn't find anything good or enjoy watching the bulletin - I thought the presenters had great voices and the news was relevant to me (except perhaps the one about the Queen) - but a critique's all about fixing what's wrong, so there you go.

Court Reporting

One of the most important elements with regards to court cases is the presumption of the accused's innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This concerns journalists a great deal, as to in any way broadcast a suggestion, whether on purpose or by an accident of bad phrasing, that one may not be innocent can lead to fines and libel cases. To even create the opportunity of implanting the jury with prejudice is in contempt of the court. This extends to even the smallest detail, and just because the layman listening to the news won't realise the world of difference between the terms 'accused' and 'defendant' does not mean journalists can be sloppy with the jargon; if that sloppiness reaches the public, the journalist may well incur a fine of up to £5000 - and probably damage their career too, I'd imagine.


Prejudice in a legal sense means to pass judgement before the accused has had a chance to prove their innocence in court. Reading McNae's, and from the lecture, I got a very strong sense of how terrible it would be for the jury to be prejudiced. After all - and correct me if I'm wrong to use the term here - the defendant's freedom rests in the decision of the jury. The jury themselves are just twelve regular adults of a working age picked at random from a list, and so it is doubly important that no prejudice is implanted into their heads. The average person is far more influenced by the things they hear than they might realise, and even the smallest gesture could implant some form of prejudice within their minds.


Since prejudice is such a big offence, a news report on court proceedings must have a purely factual basis - of course this is true for all news reports, but you certainly won't find any opinion columns in the paper on an ongoing court case. One example in recent news that stuck out to me, of an article that does its very best to maintain its impartiality, is Wednesday's Guardian article, "Saudi prince 'battered servant to death', court told". The article stresses the apparent homosexual relationship between the prince and his servant, and nearer to the end justifies the stress on their relationship by telling us that 'Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, told the jury that while a defendant's sexuality would normally be of "absolutely no relevance to a criminal trial", it was crucial in this case because there was a "sexual element to his mistreatment of Bandar."' Without this quote, the article could have appeared to imply that there was, as fact, a homosexual element, which the defendant denies and which has not been proven in court. In that case, it could have created prejudice within the jury, should they read the article and have the idea that the unproven sexual element is a fact implanted in their mind. It also could have been interpreted as malice by the defendant and his lawyers, had they not justified why the homosexual element is relevant.


Like prejudice, malice also has a definition in law, which in the case of journalism is deliberately telling a lie and broadcasting known falsities. This of course can result in a case of libel against the journalist or publisher of the particular article, which then can result in a large fine or prison time - not to mention hurt ones credibilities and lose a journalist their qualified privilege. The Daily Mirror was my tabloid of the day on Friday, and its article 'Beast raped victim twice in 3 months' exhibited to me how the press can perhaps be safely malicious. I don't mean to defend the rapist, but to call him a 'beast' in the headline and 'pervert' in text could most certainly be malicious. However, the article does not mention either the names of those involved or where it takes place  (under the law, rape victims and I think also accused rapists are granted full anonymity), and is so vague that were the accused to read it, they couldn't take the newspaper to court for libel (correct me if I've phrased that wrongly).


There's definitely more to be said on court reporting - the topics of public interest, presumption of innocence and recklessness all have big circles around them in my notes telling me I need to address them, but I feel like if I don't push at least this out now, I won't get around to the others topics later.


The blogging continues.