The relationships between the constituent nations of Great Britain and Ireland have complex histories. One key element of these relationships has been the long-standing connections between the press cultures of both islands which often manifested itself in the ease with which journalists migrated between capital cities and secured employment in their new homeland. The intricate web of connections within the press industry linking Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales at the turn of the nineteenth century was, unsurprisingly, a by-product of the political union of the four countries that was buttressed by the rise of the Irish Parliamentary Party as a potent political force from the 1880s onwards and the development of its associated press presence in Ireland and Britain. A very large number of the Irish Party's MPs were, at various times, editors and journalists and this created a network of relationships, the influence of which criss-crossed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Among the most prominent were Edmund Dwyer Gray, proprietor of the Dublin Freeman's Journal and the Belfast Morning News, William Martin Murphy, proprietor of the Dublin Irish Independent, Charles Diamond, who established the London Catholic Herald, and T. P. O’Connor, who was a leading advocate of the new journalism (Larkin 2013: 127–9). But individuals also travelled in the other direction. In 1873 the Scottish entrepreneur John Arnott purchased the Dublin Irish Times and, although no formal link existed between the two titles, in the early half of the twentieth century the editor of the Irish Times automatically served as the Irish correspondent of The Times of London. An added cross-channel connection in this regard was that the Irish Times's most celebrated editor, R. M. Smyllie, was born in Scotland and migrated to Ireland when his printer father purchased a local newspaper, The Sligo Times (Oram 1983: 136–7).

Such connections, stemming primarily from the growth of the nineteenth-century political press, continued but were transformed in the decades that followed. While Benedict Anderson's notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ of newspaper readers stems from his work on the rise of print capitalism in the nineteenth century, it is equally relevant when looking at the twentieth century which was, more than any other, the newspaper century– a period in which newspapers became central to the daily life of an ever-growing mass population of readers.