The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947 by Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947 by Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb Andrew Hobbs (bio) Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. xiv + 256. £19.99/$29.99 paperback. Forget about individual news reports for a moment; forget the writers and journalists, newspapers and publishers. Instead, stand back and look at the systems for buying, selling, and bartering news wholesale. This macro view, imported from business history, enables Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb to make sense of many Victorian newspaper phenomena, such as the unwritten rules of scissors-and-paste journalism, the growth of the provincial press in the second half of the nineteenth century, the rise of new forms of publication such as the halfpenny evening newspaper, and differences between British and American journalism. His book also addresses big questions such as the very nature of news, technological determinism, differences in kind between metropolitan and provincial journalism, and the continuities in government policy which linked the repeal of the newspaper taxes with the nationalisation of Britain’s telegraph companies. Silberstein-Loeb starts from the idea that news is property but interprets it as a commodity that has never had clear status as property. This has led governments and businesses to come up with various wheezes to deal with news as quasi-property or to subsidise its collection and distribution. [End Page 435] These wheezes have protected news from market forces, thus exposing the fiction of a free market in ideas so central to Victorian rhetoric about the educational value of journalism. Silberstein-Loeb’s comparison of news distribution in Britain and the United States highlights the influences of geography, political culture, and chance in the development of commercial telegraph companies; co-operative news associations such as the Associated Press (AP) in America and the Press Association (PA) in Britain; and commercial news agencies such as Reuters. In turn, the history of news distribution affected the different histories of newspapers on each side of the Atlantic. The American case is dealt with in the first two chapters, followed by two chapters on Britain, which will be the focus of this review. Two further chapters discuss Reuters in the British Empire and international co-operation between Reuters, the AP, Havas in France, and Wolff in Germany. To the surprise of its inventors and commercial promoters, the electric telegraph soon became popular as a carrier of news to newspapers (so much for technological determinism), and the leading British telegraph companies set up a combined “intelligence department” to gather and distribute this intelligence to newspapers. Provincial papers were their chief customers because there were more of them than London papers, but they had fewer staff to collect their own news. In America, by contrast, telegraph companies carried the news but never gathered it. Silberstein-Loeb argues that the British tradition of government subsidy for news through cheap postage (the stamp duty) continued when in 1870 the post office took over the commercial telegraph companies in the first major act of nationalisation. Provincial newspapers lobbied for preferential telegraph charges for the press, rigging the market in favour of regional papers until World War I. (Silberstein-Loeb never explains the role, if any, of London papers in these negotiations.) Provincial publishers seized the opportunity to set up the co-operative Press Association, distributing the news gathered by individual papers. Silberstein-Loeb believes that implicit government policy in favour of business plurality led to an explicit structuring of the post office telegraphs in favour of the provincial press, but he provides little evidence for this. Regardless, cheap telegraphed news benefited the provincial press more than the London press, presumably because the former were further from Parliament and other centralised news sources. They were also more dynamic in seizing the legal and commercial opportunities of nationalisation by creating the Press Association, which struck a deal with Reuters for cheap foreign news. Silberstein-Loeb examines this narrative through the business concepts of markets, property in news, co-operation (or cartels, for example between newspapers and news agencies), and its converse, exclusion (of Reuters from the...