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Privacy, Publicity, and Reputation: How the Press Regulated the Market in Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2013

James Taylor
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Abstract

Many commentators believe that the business press “missed” the story of the twenty-first century—the 2008 economic crisis. Condemned for being too close to the firms they were supposed to be holding to account, journalists failed in their duties to the public. Recent historical studies of business journalism present a similarly pessimistic picture. By contrast, this article stresses the importance of the press as a key intermediary of reputation in the nineteenth-century marketplace. In England, reporters played an instrumental role in opening up companies' general meetings to the public gaze and in warning investors of fraudulent businesses. This regulation by reputation was at least as important as company law in making the City of London a relatively safe place to do business by the start of the twentieth century.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 87 , Issue 4: Corporate Reputation , Winter 2013 , pp. 679 - 701
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013 

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References

This article was written while I was visiting research fellow at the Research Institute for History and Culture at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. I would like to thank Chris McKenna for inviting me to contribute to this special issue, and also Walter Friedman and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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