Introduction

This chapter will examine the business objectives and commercial forces that shaped the world of the British and Irish press. The business objectives and possibilities changed over the period as the periodical press transformed from the low-circulating weekly newsbooks of the 1640s to the financially robust dailies, tri-weekly and weekly papers of the late eighteenth century. What started out as a supplementary income for the news makers in question – be they publishers, printers, editors, news compilers or translators – developed into a commercial enterprise capable of providing significant financial reward even if it was not evenly divided between the various participants. In general, it was newspaper proprietors who would accumulate wealth, social prestige and political influence, whereas printers, compositors, distributors and news writers benefited to a much smaller degree from the increased financial potential of a successful news publication.

The business of managing a news publication was complex. Apart from advertising, which became key to sustaining newspaper viability and profitability, news publishers also contended with business considerations such as the cost of paper, distribution (and the ways in which it could be improved), how many people to employ and, not least, punitive taxes on newspapers and how best to evade their full effect. All these matters, coupled with other operational considerations such as managing content, design and formats, had an impact on the newspaper's price, sales and possible profits.

Early Developments

The possibility that a regular supply of print news could be profitable was recognised in the early 1620s with the first series of sequentially numbered news-sheets or corantos. In 1622 a five-person syndicate of individual printers who had previously published occasional news pamphlets teamed up to publish a coranto in the expectation of financial gain (Raymond 2003: 132–3). News had become the new social commodity: everyone wanted to read the latest information on events, and even if corantos were restricted to reporting foreign news, there was strong interest in relevant events such as the fast-developing Thirty Years War, which it was hoped would lead to Protestant victories against the Catholic imperial forces.