The Making of a Media Category

Abstract

As early as the late eighteenth century, there were English-language periodicals published from Paris. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when well-capitalised American periodicals began to be launched from the city, that a transnational English-language press in the city began to develop into a distinctive media category. This essay examines the activities surrounding these periodicals at the time, following Bruno Latour’s sociology of action, which holds that we can learn about social actors and cultural productions by following their activities and their controversies. The intense journalistic activities of these periodicals during this period left many traces, revealing a little-known media history of start-ups and experiments, innovation and failure, and association and rivalry, as well as group making and community building. These activities also capture a particular moment in the history of the transnational press in Paris when a rather undefined type of journalism and public became something more both within the city and throughout Europe. To examine how these periodicals were referring to each other, establishing journalistic practices, developing infrastructure, and chronicling their own histories is to witness how they were in the process of constituting themselves as a distinctive transnational media formation. By following journalism in action, we can uncover this transnational media history in the making.