“Doing things differently” and “striking while the iron was hot”: The entrepreneurial successes of the media magnate George Newnes, 1881–1910

Abstract

George Newnes became one of the most influential popular publishers of the age of New Journalism, and was probably Britian’s first media magnate. He published a vast number and variety of journals in the period from 1881 until his death in 1910, editing some of these, but leaving an impression upon all of them. Newnes’s periodicals included Tit-Bits (1881), Strand Magazine (1891), The Million (1892), Westminster Gazette (1893), Country Life (1897), The Ladies Field (1898), Wide World Magazine (1898), The Captain (1899), and C.B. Fry’s Magazine (1904). Newnes was an innovator, and a publishing entrepreneur. This paper will focus on the entrepreneurial aspects of Newnes’s publishing ventures and the novel technological and promotional techniques pioneered by him. The analysis will focus upon such techniques as promotional schenesm advertising, production and illustration, the employment and promotion of popular authors, editors and illustrators, publicity, market segmentation, and financing. The concluding section consists of an investigation into some of the rhetoric that has been applied to Newnes’s publishing career, and the way in which, as publishing entrepreneur and media magnate, Newnes’s successes have been cast within a continuing debate over popular literature, New Journalism and the commercialization of the popular press in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.