![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
A satirical weekly paper called the Grub-Street Journal ( GSJ 1730–1737) offered an innovative approach to managing the flow of unverified and contradictory reports that accompanied the growth of newspapers in eighteenth-century London. Using the fictional persona of ‘Quidnunc’ (a contemporary term for news addicts), the editor Richard Russel compiled accounts of the same event from several newspapers and juxtaposed them on the page, thereby revealing their similarities and differences. Russel’s manual version of news ‘aggregation’ exposed errors and contradictions, but it also provided readers with details that would have otherwise required consulting several sources. Meanwhile, Quidnunc interjected ironic remarks, poking fun at the pretensions of news writers, politicians, and others. Anchored in the literary culture of its time, and drawing on learned traditions of textual editing, the GSJ offered readers an eighteenth-century version of media criticism through satire.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Michiel van Groesen and Helmer Helmers for coordinating the ‘Managing the News in Early Modern Europe’ conference and publications. For comments and advice, the author is also grateful to Ann Blair, Victoria Gardner, Anthony Grafton, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, Mary C. Kelley, Robert Mankin, Suzanne Podhurst, Michael Winship, and the participants of the ‘Digital Antiquarian’ conference (American Antiquarian Society, 2015), where parts of this research were presented.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Smolkin, “What the Mainstream Media Can Learn”; Cutbirth, “Satire as Journalism.”
2. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits; Goldgar, “The Grub Street Journal”; Harris, London Newspapers, chap. 4.
3. Goldgar, The Grub-Street Journal. The GSJ began with a modest print run of 500 in January 1730, but by the following spring it was printing 2000 copies per week (Goldgar, The Grub-Street Journal, vol. 1: xiv–xv). This was a respectable figure considering the literary and satirical nature of the publication. Although the most popular political weeklies in the 1730s may have peaked at about 10,000 copies, daily newspapers at the time would rarely have reached more than 1000 copies (Harris, London Newspapers, 55–7, 115–7).
4. See Nelson and Seccombe, Periodical Publications, 90–6.
5. Grub-Street Journal [hereafter GSJ], August 8, 1734.
6. Black, English Press; Knights, Representation; Heyd, Reading Newspapers.
7. See Raymond, Invention.
8. Harris, “London Newspapers,” 422; Barker, Newspapers, 29–30.
9. Goldie, “Introduction,” ix–xxv; Slauter, “Rise of the Newspaper”.
10. On learned textual practices see Blair and Stallybrass, “Mediating Information”; Blair, Too Much to Know; and Grafton, La Page. On the place of news writers in this tradition, see Dooley, Social History. On one eighteenth-century newspaper reader’s archival practices, see Heyd, Reading Newspapers, 113–7, 220–9.
11. Harris, London Newspapers, 105–7.
12. Black, English Press, chap. 4.
13. Slauter, “Paragraph.”
14. Gardner, Business of News, 27–8.
15. Harris, London Newspapers, 99–101, 105–6, 160–1.
16. Goldgar, Grub-Street Journal, vol. 1: viii–x; Goldgar, “Russel.”
17. Grafton, La Page, 177–9.
18. Goldgar, Grub-Street Journal, vol. 1: viii.
19. Heyd, Reading Newspapers, 196–213.
20. On the political affiliations of newspapers, see Harris, London Newspapers, 113–33.
21. GSJ, January 8, 1730.
22. Ibid., July 2, 1730; July 16, 1730.
23. Ibid., June 14, 1733.
24. Ibid., October 8, 1730.
25. Ibid., March 15, 1733.
26. Ibid., September 10, 1730.
27. Ibid., July 23, 1730.
28. Ibid., June 22, 1732.
29. Ibid., June 4, 1730.
30. Ibid., July 22, 1731.
31. Ibid., January 29, 1730.
32. Ibid., March 9, 1732.
33. Ibid., November 5, 1730.
34. Ibid., October 1, 1730.
35. Ibid., August 23, 1733.
36. Ibid., August 12, 1731.
37. Ibid., April 30, 1730.
38. Ibid., May 6, 1731.
39. Ibid., September 3, 1730.
40. Ibid., February 19, 1730.
41. Ibid., June 29, 1732.
42. Ibid., October 21, 1731.
43. Ibid., February 11, 1731.
44. Ibid., March 25, 1731.
45. Ibid., February 25, 1731.
46. Ibid., September 9, 1731.
47. Ibid., September 9, 1731; June 17, 1731.
48. Ibid., January 13, 1732.
49. Qtd. in Slauter, “Upright Piracy,” 44, which describes this episode in detail.
50. GSJ, April 5, 1733.
51. Qtd. in Black, “British Press and Europe,” 65.
52. Slauter, “Upright Piracy.”
53. GSJ, January 3, 1734.
54. Qtd. in Harris, London Newspapers, 160.
55. Cranfield, Development, 30–1 mentions the North Country Journal (Newcastle) and Reading Journal as using similar initials to the GSJ.
56. See Blair, Too Much to Know, 213–29; and Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 25–33.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Will Slauter
Will Slauter, Université Paris Diderot–Institut universitaire de France, UFR d’Études Anglophones, Case 7046, 5 rue Thomas Mann, Paris 75013, France.