The press has always been as dynamic as its subject matter. Alongside constantly changing political and cultural climates, the press is affected by individual house regulations, legal issues concerning what can and cannot be said (i.e. libellous statements) and taxes which directly affect the profitability of the business. An example of the latter is 60 years before the American Revolution: Queen Anne was unhappy with the British press at the time, and sought to punish them for their distribution of “false and scandalous libels.” Subsequently, this led Parliament to pass the Stamp Act of 1712. The effects of the Stamp Act were still strong until 1861, when the tax on paper was lifted.
The paper tax served to restrain the size of pages in a publication. It made editors attempt to navigate those rules by simply changing the size and type of text to fit more on a page, and resort to cramming information in. This resulted in pages containing nothing but a formless mass of text, as line breaks and stylisation were considered a waste of the increasingly precious space.
The ultimate purpose of the Stamp Act was to force publishers to raise their sale prices correspondingly to the taxes on paper, advertisements and the business in general, which meant that their newspaper was less widely circulated than before. Because of this, most independent publications disappeared.
The only way that the remaining newspapers could prevent their businesses from folding was by selling space in their papers to advertisers – which is still in practice to this day. Publication of most mass media would be impossible without sponsorship. Advertisements were representative of the events at the time – when the fight for American independence began in 1775, a lot of space was bought to promote army recruitment.
Peacetime was also largely influential on the proliferation of the newspaper. Consumers were always likely to want to read about a war in which England was currently embroiled; when a war finished, a percentage of the readership would vanish with it. Sales dipped in peacetime decades such as 1720 and 1780, but those periods were when other conventions in newspapers started to become popular. Advertisements, sports and fashion pieces became more prominent for the lack of war-reporting. Political news and commentary from America was also a feature after the American Revolution, because the English public were curious to see how the newly independent country was organising itself.
While English publications were formerly shipped to America, it was not long until colonists established their own local papers. The journalists on either side would then correspond through letters: Felix Farley's Bristol Journal had contacts in both Boston and Philadelphia in 1747. Articles would either consist of extracts from a letter or information derived from it: the Gloucester Journal reported the news of an unsuccessful advance across central America, citing a letter addressed to a Jamaican gentleman as its source.
References used:
- Alfred Grant - Our American Brethren: A History of Letters in the British Press During the American Revolution, 1775-1781. McFarland Publishers
- Jeremy Black – The English Press, 1621 – 1861. Sutton Publishing
