The story of the business press in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland encapsulates many of the features of wider developments in journalism and publishing during the period. It is inextricably tied to the growth of financial markets, trade and industrial expansion. As Andrew King rightly notes, the real expansion of business publishing emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century (King 2009c: 219). Searching the Waterloo Directory database shows 1,429 specialist business titles, including directories and almanacs, appearing between 1800 and 1899. However, a search on the first half of the century yields only 319. A search based only on the last quarter of the century comes up with 907 titles. This expansion parallels the spread of news reporting and the availability of specialist titles across the board, which is also matched by the significant increase in copy length and number of pages dedicated to business news in non-specialist newspapers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Like the London Stock Exchange, the business press can trace its origins to the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the price sheets that were circulated among brokers transacting in those spaces. Effective financial news reporting depended then, as now, on the combination of accuracy and speed: as markets grew and investors sought to expand, shorter publication intervals and innovations in technology and distribution became paramount. Foreign news reporting was also essential, as wars and events abroad brought risk for some investors and profit opportunities for others.

Another important development in the sector's growth was the broadening of readerships. It had been constrained in the first half of the century by taxation of news and duty on paper, which raised cover prices and production costs and confined readership to those who could afford such texts. As King points out, advertising duty (removed in 1853) also applied to notices of shareholders meetings and dividends, a significant feature of business material in print news channels (King 2009c: 219). As taxes on advertising, newspapers and paper were gradually removed, production became cheaper and circulations expanded. Business reporting progressed from the piecemeal and often locally oriented recording of shipping, commodity prices, stocks and bonds, to daily specialist newspapers targeted at a global audience and incorporating all the features associated with ‘New Journalism’ – speed, technology, personal reporting, persuasive writing and even sensation.