01 August 2016
New nationals
Newspapers may be in decline, but that isn't stopping publishers coming up with fresh ways in which to produce the news in print.Over the past two years we have seen four new 'national' newspapers appear in the UK: The National, The New Day, 24 - The North's National and The New European. Each presents a different twist on the idea of what a UK national newspaper means, targeting a different sector of the nation in ways that bring national divisions into sharp relief. Not all have managed to survive.
The National is a Scottish daily, produced by Newsquest as 32-page tabloid and sister paper to The Herald broadsheet. It was launched on 24 November 2014 in the wake of the Scottish referendum, with a strong pro-independence line. It was initially produced an a five-day trial basis, an experiment that was extended after strong sales in the first week. The original print run was 60,000 copies, but although the number has fallen to below 20,000 copies (plus around 2,500 digital subscribers), the newspaper has survived, moving from five to six issues a week in January 2015.
The New Day was launched by Trinity Mirror on 29 February 2016, as a daily title in a 40-page tabloid format. It was heralded as the first new British national daily newspaper since i in 2010 - depending on how you identify a 'national' title. It boldly chose to have no digital manifestation, its website being a mere holding page. Initially priced at 25p, this rose to 40p and then 50p. It was aimed at an audience that had given up on newspapers, which was always going to be a challenge. Fatefully the newspaper was given the slogan "Life is short, let’s live it well", because its life turned out to be short. A hoped-for circulation of 200,000 copies was never achieved, and after two months and sales having dropped to 30,000 copies the title closed on 6 May.
24 - the North's National was launched by the CN Group as a 40-page tabloid on 20 June 2016, priced at 40p. It billed itself as being a national newspaper with a "distinctly Northern perspective". Distributed across north west England and southern Scotland, targeting an area not reached by the free Metro newspaper, it aimed to rethink where the centre of national news should be. Much of its copy came from the Press Association. It turned out to have a shorter life than even The New Day, closing after just a month on 29 July 2016, having found sales to be disappointing and the challenge of "squeez[ing] into beside the big beasts of the daily market" too great.
The New European was launched on 8 July 2016 in the aftermath of the EU referendum result, published by the regional newspaper group Archant in an eye-catching Berliner format, a weekly title priced at £2. Remarkably, the newspaper was produced just nine days after the idea was first proposed. Aimed at "the 48%" who voted Remain, and distributed in those areas of the UK where the majority voted that way, the paper was announced as being a 'pop-up' title, to have just four editions initially, before the publishers would review the situation. The title turned out to be a success, indeed profitable, with further editions now promised "on a rolling basis".
All four titles have been aimed at different sectors of the nation, with different ideas of what 'nation' actually means. They represent as much uncertainty over identity as they do uncertainty over newspaper publishing business models. Of course, few national titles have ever reached the entirety of the UK, strongly delineated as it is by region, nation and class, but these new titles suggest that the struggle for print newspapers today is as much about defining an audience as finding it.
The two that have succeeded (so far) have done so through strategies that limited risk by starting off with test publications. Each has been aimed at audiences impassioned by referendum results that did not go their way, and sustained by a belief that change may still yet happen. Ultimately though, The National and The New European have succeeded through having strong content. It is not enough simply to identify a supposedly neglected community - you need to give them something to read.
All four titles have been archived by the British Library - The New Day and 24 - The North's National in their entirety.
01 June 2016
St. Pancras Intelligencer no. 39
It's time for another edition in our occasional series on news about news, the St Pancras Intelligencer. Here are some of the recent stories on where news and where it might be going which have caught our eye.
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
Death to the Mass - Jeff Jarvis writes on the death of the traditional idea of the mass media as delivering the same content to everyone. What replaces it will be tailored to the individual, who is now the king over everything:
What has died is the mass-media business model — injuring, perhaps mortally, a host of institutions it symbiotically supported: publishing, broadcasting, mass marketing, mass production, political parties, possibly even our notion of a nation. We are coming at last to the end of the Gutenberg Age.
All well and good, says Roy Greenslade, but how in this brave new world are we to save public interest journalism?
When it comes to social media, news consumers tend to stick with 1 source - Media plurality is all very good, but humans still tend to stick with the familiar. The Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation find that 64 percent of social media news consumers get their news on just one favorite site.
43 percent of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared - Some disheartening news for all news brands, as Digiday reports that 43% of social media users are unaware of them.Why China fakes 488 million social media posts a year - Mind-boggling report from Mashable on how China's government fills its social media with positive social media comments to distract its citizens from bad or politically sensitive news.
Digital archives of British national newspapers - Our own guide to current UK national newspapers available digitally at the British Library (and those which can't be found digitally anywhere).
A neighbor is better than a newspaper - A rather heartening report from Solutions Journalism Network, showing how the oldest form of news distribution - word-of-mouth - operates in rural Western mountain communities in the USA.
Facebook's Instant Articles
Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show - So many stories out there about how Facebook's algorithms are shaping the world's news. The Guardian reports on the humans behind the algorithms making selection decisions much like a traditional media organisation. Quartz has Facebook’s news feed algorithm is so mysterious, users are developing “folk theories” about how it works; Will Cathcart at The Verge has a long talk with Facebook about its role in journalism; Fusion reminds us that the real ‘news curators’ at Facebook are the engineers who write its algorithms; while The Independent reports Facebook denies claims it suppressed conservative and controversial news on its ‘Trending Topics’ sidebar.
Facebook is the new paperboy - And there's more. Matt Carroll at Medium traces the history of news distribution from paperboys to platforms, and how this is changing how newsrooms work.
Social networks could do much more to protect eyewitnesses in breaking news - Josh Stearns at FirstDraftNews calls on Facebook, Twitter and Google to do more to help eyewitnesses supplying on-the-spot news at disasters to protect and understand their rights.
Beware the ‘false consciousness’ theory: newspapers won’t decide this referendum - Charlie Beckett at LSE's Polis blog says that traditional newspapers no longer have the influence over something like the EU Referendum debate that campaigners imagine they have.
How the New York Times plans to conquer the world - Alex Spence at Politico reports on how the New York Times is eyeing Europe for new digital subscribers.
Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall - The end has been nigh for a while now, but Roy Greenslade is now certain: newspapers "have no future".
A BBC for the future - And finally, among all the stories coming out the BBC White Paper - funding local journalists, cutting back on sections of its News website, no longer running local news index web pages, possibly merging the News and World channels - we were pleased to see this line lurking towards the back of the document: "There should be particular scope to do more to enable access to BBC historic news archive". Let's hope so.
19 May 2016
Digital archives of British national newspapers
Did you know that the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised by online publishers and that these are all available for free in British Library Reading Rooms? With the recent addition of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday to the digital archives you can search at the British Library, it’s a good opportunity to review what’s available for all current British nationals.
The Times was the first national newspaper to digitise its historic back run and The Times Digital Archive has been available in British Library Reading Rooms since 2003. This is a vast archive which allows users to search every page of the newspaper from its first issue in 1785 (when it was known as the Daily Universal Register) up to 2010.
The archive offers access to a 225 year back run of The Times and contains, in total, over 70,000 issues which include over 1.6 million pages or more than 11.8 million articles. The entire file is searchable by keyword and by date and the content can be viewed at page or article level. In addition there is an advanced search facility which enables a search to be focussed on particular parts of the newspaper such as ‘News’ or ‘Reviews’ or ‘Politics’.
In the years since 2003, when The Times Digital Archive first became available, back runs of most of the other currently published British national newspapers have been digitised and these are all available in British Library Reading Rooms. The titles are:
- Daily Express: 1900 to date, and Sunday Express: 2000 to date
- Daily Mail: 1896-2004
- Daily Mirror: 1903 to date
- Daily Star/ Star on Sunday: 2000 to date
- Daily Telegraph: 1855-2000 and Sunday Telegraph: 1961-2000
- Financial Times: 1888-2010
- Guardian: 1824 -2003
- Independent: 1986-2012, and Independent on Sunday: 1990-2012
- Observer: 1791-2003
- Scotsman: 1870-1950
- The Times: 1785-2010, and Sunday Times 1822-2006
Links to all of these can be via our Electronic Resources page (select Newspapers as a subject, then refine your search by Full Text). Please note that electronic access only works in British Library Reading Rooms and on our terminals.
Although the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised and made available online, not every current British national is available in this way. The following titles do not yet have digital archives:
- Daily Record
- i
- Morning Star
- People
- The Sun
Sample search on the Telegraph Historical Archive
The most recent additions to the list of digitised archives of British national newspapers are The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday. These titles have only been available on our Reading Rooms since earlier this year.
The Telegraph Historical Archive contains over 1 million facsimile pages of The Daily Telegraph from the first issue published in 1855 to the year 2000 and the Sunday Telegraph from its inception in 1961 up to 2012.
The Independent Digital Archive contains approximately 750,000 facsimile pages and includes every issue of The Independent from 1986 to 2012 and every issue of The Independent on Sunday from its inception in 1990 up to 2012.
In some cases it is possible to carry out a combined search of more than one historic newspaper archive which can increase the efficiency of the search process and deliver a wider range of results from different types of newspaper. The historic archives of The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Independent and Independent on Sunday are all hosted by the same on-line publisher (Gale Cengage) and these archives can be searched individually or in a combination of two or more titles. Similarly, the historic archives of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Star on Sunday are hosted by another on-line publisher (UKpressonline), and the archives of The Guardian and The Scotsman (along with the Irish Times) are hosted by ProQuest Historical Newspapers. It is possible to combine a search of two or more newspapers within these groups of titles as well.
Digital newspaper archives have transformed the use of historic newspapers in research. Whereas in the past it might have taken days, weeks or even months to search through large bound volumes of newspapers or to trawl through endless reels of microfilm to find all the information needed for a particular research topic, in a digital archive the information is much more easily accessible and can often be found in almost no time at all.
Stephen Lester, Newspaper Curator
14 April 2016
Using old newspapers
Denise Bates is a writer on social history whose latest book, Historical Research using British Newspapers, is a guide to using newspaper archives in research, particularly the British Newspaper Archive. In this guest blog post, she describes what led her to write about using digitised newspapers.
The inspiration for Historical Research Using British Newspapers was a very modern concept; the blog. I used old newspapers extensively whilst researching my first two books, Pit Lasses and Breach of Promise to Marry. The positive reaction to my blog for the British Newspaper Archive about the differences between national and local newspapers surprised me as I had not expected this to be new learning. After more investigation I realised that twenty-first century historians have an exciting new resource, digitised, on-line newspapers, but little information about using them effectively. The seeds of my next project were planted.
When I first started using old newspapers, like many researchers I was learning on the job and made mistakes along the way. These included not knowing which titles were the best ones to consult first and thus wasting time trying to understand a topic that was well-covered in a different publication. I also made unrealistic assumptions about how much time was needed to locate and study reports. I decided on a book which brought together the many issues that are relevant to users of old newspapers, including the history of the press, how to find good quality information, how to use it productively and the pitfalls to avoid.
Digitised newspapers have a growing fan-base. Their preserved pages contain a rich vein of forgotten material, allowing researchers to broaden their enquiries from the standard sources on many topics and to cite new examples, rather than recycling the same few. Newspapers sometimes offer an unorthodox view of the past, with content which challenges the version that has been handed down in exam syllabuses and popular histories alike. For topics that have not been studied or written about, newspapers are an accessible way of rediscovering aspects of the past that have been forgotten.
Illustrated Police News 29 July 1882. An artist's impression of a breach of promise case and a case of child cruelty.
Unanticipated discoveries have changed my understanding of the nineteenth century. When I used court reports to delve into the archaic world of the jilted women and men who sued a former fiancé for compensation, I found that no-win-no fee lawyers, who I had previously believed to be a product of the late twentieth century, ran flourishing practices as early as the 1820s. When I looked at several cases involving child cruelty or neglect in the 1890s, I entered a world of high-minded social workers who could not comprehend how the people they were trying to help had to live. Amongst some very serious and indisputable instances of ill-treatment, were several shocking but unwarranted accusations of laziness, selfishness and drunkenness made against caring parents whose wages were too low to feed and clothe their children properly, even though they had been instructed about cleanliness and nutrition. Suddenly I knew the roots of the fear that haunted working-class families as I grew up in the 1960s, that if you didn't do as 'they' said, 'they' might take your children away.
'Eruption of Mount Vesuvius', Penny Illustrated Paper, 17 October 1863. This scene would have been a revelation to most readers of the time.
Every type of material has its drawbacks and old newspapers are far from being the perfect resource. The number of pages that are already on-line can make them unwieldy to handle if a query produces a large number of matches. It is possible to become overwhelmed by detail and miss important information or insight. There are plenty of places in the news chain where error can creep into a report and sometimes they cover a topic in a very superficial way. Occasionally a researcher may strike lucky and quickly locate an editorial or journalist's investigation that provides a complete answer. More usually it will be necessary to find, collate and analyse a number of individual reports in order to uncover the full story or unlock relevant learning.
Almost all sources are affected by bias and newspapers are no exception. They have been subjected to censorship, may have printed propaganda or portrayed opinion as fact. These problems are not insurmountable, but users need to know how to recognise and manage them in order to avoid jumping to false conclusions.
When newspapers were first published, they opened up a wider world to the literate people of the day. Reproduced digitally, they are now allowing twenty-first century researchers to immerse themselves in the past in a way that no other resource can and make new discoveries.
Denise Bates (www.denisebates.co.uk)
07 April 2016
St. Pancras Intelligencer no. 38
It has been a while since we produced an edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our round-up of news about news. Producing a regular series proved to be rather too much of a challenge, but not wanting to see a good title go down, we are recasting the Intelligencer as an occasional series. Much like the first newspapers in the 17th century, we will publish a new edition when we have gathered enough stories to fill the space available. So here is some of what has been happening recently in the world of news about news.
http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de
The Panama Papers. The leak of millions of papers from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has sent shockwaves across the world. The story behind the leak is as fascinating as the outcome. Wired gives the background story. The now famous International Consortium of Investigative Journalists collates the information on a smartly designed special website. And the newspaper that first received the documents, Süddeutsche Zeitung, has its own stylish website dedicated to the story, in German and English, which dramatises the material with fine use of illustrations and charts.
The art of being in the wrong place at the right time: behind the scenes of social media newsgathering. A powerful piece by David Crunelle, eyewitness to the Brussels airport bombings who was then bombarded with requests from the news media.
Editor hits out at "supine journalism" in regional press. Mike Gibson, editor of the Brighton Argus, criticises the "poor state" of much of the English regional press, as reported by Hold the Front Page.
Can newspapers do anything to stop the advertising exodus? Roy Greenslade worries about the future viability of newspapers, assailed by falling advertising revenues on one hand and the use of ad-blocking software on the other.
The life and times of a newspaper baron. Interesting piece by Peter Day on BBC News on Lord Thomson of Fleet, owner of The Times before Rupert Murdoch.
Action Research in Audience Analytics. A report from Nesta on how hyperlocals can learn from their audiences to build up their audiences.
Do newspaper archives need a “dead man’s switch”? Thought-provoking piece from Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz on the perils of disappearing digital newspaper archives.
http://www.thecinetourist.net/news.html
The Cine-Tourist is a film history site with a psychogeographical bent, managed by Roland-François Lack of University College London. His speciality is gathering thematic screengrabs from historic films, and he has produced a terrific gallery of scenes from films in which real and imaginary newspapers appear. See which films you recognise.
Investigative brand journalism. Nieman Lab looks at the Guardian's true crime reporting series, How to Solve a Murder, with its sponsorship from Amazon.
Newspapers gobble each other up to survive digital apocalypse. Great title for a Bloomberg piece on American newspaper business strategies.
"The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality". Journalist-turned-historian Dean Kirby (guest writing for the Newsroom blog) looks at the worst parts of 19th century Manchester and what newspaper archives reveal about them.
Independent launches paid-for digital edition. As we said goodbye to the print editions of The Independent and the Independent on Sunday, a new paid-for digital daily edition appeared, looking much like the print version (doubtless to reassure traditional subscribers). On the same subject, the Indy gave us a gallery of the best of its front covers (note how raggedy the pre-digital-era copies now look), and wrote boldly about the opportunities offered by new technologies. At Medital, Torin Douglas looked back to 1986 and the founding of the The Independent. And at this blog, we attended a debate on print newspapers post-Independent and what the digital future might be, and concluded that nobody knows anything.
El Pais, Spain's best-selling newspaper may end print edition. If you thought The Independent going digital only was big news, consider that Spain's leading newspaper may go the same way.
Scale of Hearst plot to discredit Orson Welles and Citizen Kane revealed. Dalya Alberge at The Guardian on a new book by Harlan Lebo that shows how hard William Randolph Hearst tried to attack Citizen Kane, the greatest of all newspaper movies.
The New Day is selling just 40,000 copies a day but Trinity Mirror stands by its launch despite the slow start. And finally, we have a new national newspaper in The New Day (boldly refusing to have a website), but as The Drum reports, the take-up figures aren't encouraging so far for a newspaper aimed at those who don't read newspapers.
31 March 2016
Nobody knows anything
The screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride) wrote one of the essential books on Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Among its many words of wisdom about how movies actually work, the most celebrated are those that express what he calls "the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry" -
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING
Attending a debate on the future of newspapers at City University yesterday, Goldman's words came to me. In the world of digital news that now faces us, nobody knows anything.
Independent Digital front pages, from http://edition.independent.co.uk
Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Hollywood may lurch from triumph to disaster to further disaster with little idea of what is going to succeed, yet it continues to produce the occasional great or commercially successful film, and it has not collapsed as a business. But it lives in a constant state of anxiety, because its hopes are all based around the whims of a mercurial audience. After centuries of producing news in a form that people would regularly buy into, the news industry is now facing a world in which it cannot say from one year to the next what model is going to work, or whether there ever will be the same stability on which the newspaper business subsisted for so long.
The debate was entitled "Newsprint - it ain't over yet!" (originally it was billed as the less confident "Is print dead?") and was organised by City University and the Media Society. Chaired by Professor Roy Greenslade of City University and Guardian Media, the guest speakers were Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, Christian Broughton, Editor of the Independent Digital and Jane Singer, Professor of Journalism Innovation at City University. Sadly, Alison Phillips, editor of the UK's latest national newspaper, The New Day, was advertised but not available on the day.
It was an interesting debate, if somewhat skewed towards the view of journalists rather than readers, inevitably given the speakers and the audience of journalism students and media professionals. The current crises were all addressed - the challenges of making digital pay, the supposed threat of the BBC towards regional newspapers, the challenge of ad-blocking software to business models, what jobs are there for today's journalism students? - and the generally expressed fears of who will hold governments to account in a world without newspapers and traditional investigative journalism.
The two speakers from news organisations spoke confidently about their latest business models. The Independent closed its print edition on 26 March, but has strongly asserted the power of its digital, with a website that is profitable, and the newly-launched daily digital edition with front-page layout looking for all the world like the print edition still existed (no doubt to comfort former subscribers to the print version who they hope will move over to the digital). The Times and Sunday Times have announced that they are moving away from a rolling digital news model (the "flim-flam of passing news" in Baxter's words) to offer a joint digital news package in timed editions (9am, midday and 5pm), just like a print newspaper.
The debate at City University, with (L-R) Christian Broughton, Jane Singer, Roy Greenslade and Sarah Baxter
So the latest digital news models are looking towards mimicking the solidity of print. This may comfort the traditionalist buyers, and is an acknowledgment of the power of brand and the strength of print in making a news story part of the public agenda. But that's just today's strategy. Who can say if they will still be operational five years from now, or even a year from now? Other great ideas for ensuring long-term stability will follow soon enough, while others will pursue their own plans. Perhaps the Blendle model of pay-per-article, as developed in the Netherlands, will prove successful. Perhaps philanthropic funding models that work in the USA can be transported here. Perhaps the paid-for model adopted by The Times offers the only security. Perhaps going free but reaching out to as many millions as possible is what will work. Perhaps print will endure far longer than we expect, valued by an 'elite' audience if not the majority.
The truth is, nobody knows. This is a huge challenge for the British Library, which has a mission to preserve the UK's news. Such archiving thrives on consistency of output, something which print newspapers have long provided, with their uniformity of format and regularity of publication. The days of certainty are over for news archiving as they are for news publication. We will have to keep reinventing policies and procedures, just to keep up. It certainly seems unlikely that we will ever return to the reliability of the past. Sarah Baxter said that we are in a transitional phase of news production, but perhaps it is always going to be a transitional phase.
News publication in the future looks to be condemned to uncertainty, flitting from one platform to another, from one business model to the next - because that is how the digital world works, with its continual need to keep re-inventing itself. News publication will nevertheless thrive, however, in one form or another, because we will always thirst for news. It will continue to hit the occasional heights, keeping us informed and creating essential talking points. But, like the movies, it is doomed to a constant state of anxiety, for as long into the future as anyone can see.
23 March 2016
"The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality"
Dean Kirby is a journalist who has been covering the news in and around Manchester, his home city, for nearly 20 years. His debut book, Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain's Most Savage Slum, published by Pen & Sword, is the first history of Angel Meadow, the 19th century Manchester slum so vile and dangerous that it was described by Friedrich Engels as "hell upon earth". To find out more about the book, visit www.angelmeadowbook.com. Here, Dean tells how he used British Library newspapers at the British Newspaper Archive to uncover the horrors of Angel Meadow.
When Manchester was the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, Angel Meadow was the city’s vilest and most dangerous slum.
A wild and brutal borderland at the northern edge of Cottonopolis, it was home to 30,000 workers who struggled for survival in conditions so appalling that it was described by Friedrich Engels as “hell upon earth” in 1845.
I became fascinated by the story of Angel Meadow when I discovered that my Victorian forefather, an Irish immigrant named William Kirby, had washed up there after surviving the potato famine.
In 2012, archaeologists investigating Victorian Manchester’s horrors made a startling discovery while digging up a car park in Angel Meadow – my ancestor’s home.
They gave me permission to clamber down a shaky ladder to touch the still-sooty bricks of William’s fireplace and the paper-thin walls that separated his 10ft-square, one-up-one-down from the house next door.
As I searched for clues about my ancestor’s life in Manchester’s archives and began formulating the idea of writing a book, I started to drift off to the slum in my imagination.
I descended into damp cellars, stumbled through backyard pigsties and came face-to-face with scarred and tattooed street fighters or “scuttlers” in the slum’s smoke-filled beer houses.
I crept into dingy lodging houses where new arrivals were forced to sleep naked with strangers because it was the only way to keep their clothes free from lice.
The more I read, the most astonished I became by my ancestor’s survival in this hellish place – leading to my own existence more than a century later in the city that his blood sweat and tears had helped to create.
Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1849
My journey of discovery was led by an army of Victorian journalists who walked those streets for real, and whose words have survived among the millions of pages in the British Newspaper Archive.
They included men such as the Fleet Street journalist Angus Bethune Reach, who told readers of the Morning Chronicle in 1849 of his descent into one of Angel Meadow’s many inhabited cellars, where he found an old man asleep in a shallow cave no bigger than a coffin scooped out of the wall.
“The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality in Manchester is called, singularly enough, Angel Meadow,” he wrote. “It is full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants, tramps and, in the very worst sties of filth and darkness, by those unhappy wretches, the low Irish.”
Another journalist from the Manchester Evening News, my former newspaper, found himself on the run from the police in 1874 after entering a beerhouse disguised as a rogue with a criminal named Mack acting as his guide.
The terrified reporter fled into a lodging house operated by a notorious thief-trainer named Cabbage Ann and found her superintending a wake for an eminent pick-pocket or “gun”.
“The place looked squalid and miserable,” the journalist later wrote, “and the people in it were of poor, miserable appearance, as if they found it hard to live at all.”
Searching the newspaper archive like an investigator hunting for further clues, I slowly managed to piece together the real identity of Cabbage Ann, and other slum dwellers with exotic names such as Jemmy the Crawler, the Badger and Long Dick.
Beautifully-written nineteenth century court reports allowed me to follow every twist and turn of their lengthy criminal careers, while useful snippets such as weather forecasts helped me to say whether it was raining in Manchester when they committed their crimes.
Henry Burgess, from Staffordshire Record Office
I also used census documents and prison archives held by findmypast.co.uk to create pen pictures of the most notorious criminals – right down to their eye colour and tattoos.
One man in particular jumped out from the pages. He was called Henry Burgess (Harry to his relatives) and he was a scuttler who, at just 5ft-tall and with steel-coloured eyes, was the most feared man in Angel Meadow.
Burgess, a neighbour of my ancestor William Kirby, had more than 40 convictions to his name including shop-breaking, rioting and assaults on police. No-one was safe including his partner, Mary Ellen Burns, who lost an eye when he attacked her with an iron poker.
Thanks to the stories in the archive, I eventually managed to track down a prison mugshot of Burgess in which he stares with cold, hard eyes and shaven head towards the camera.
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 9 May 1893
In all of the hundreds of pages of newsprint that I read during my research, one story involving Burgess perfectly symbolised the horrors of Angel Meadow.
On Saturday, May 6, 1893, as Britain was sweltering under a drought, Burgess got into a row with a rival named Thomas Matthews in the streets of the slum.
He took a paraffin lantern from his sister’s parlour, marched down the street and, planting his feet on the cobbles, threw it at Matthews and turned him into a human fireball.
Matthews, a father to a young daughter, died from horrific burns at Manchester Royal Infirmary in the early hours after giving a statement to the police identifying Burgess as his killer.
Matthews' final words were immortalised in black newspaper ink in one of the many columns, just a few inches long, that had been carefully preserved in the British Newspaper Archive.
I was perhaps the first person to read those words, spoken by Matthews with badly burned lips and tongue, in more than 120 years.
“I am very ill,” he said, “and I believe I am going to die.”
Dean Kirby
14 February 2016
From print to digital
The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are to close down, and the spin-off newspaper i to be sold off to Johnston Press, has led to much discussion about the future of newspapers. Is the decision to cease print and develop the independent.co.uk website a sign of the death of print newspapers? Was The Independent squeezed out of the market and hence a failure, or is the shift to web-only a timely strategic move, supported by growing use of what is apparently a profitable website, which other newspapers will inevitably follow in turn? Can a newspaper brand survive when it no longer has a newspaper?
The Independent in print, via Independent.co.uk
Here at the British Library we have seen many newspapers come and go. We take in 1,400 newspaper publications of one sort or another every week, but we have some 35,000 newspaper titles listed on our catalogue. A lot of newspapers have ceased publication over the past 400 years, and The Independent is merely the latest. But the gradual transference of a news industry from print to digital has major implications for what we collect in this area, and how. It is something that we are studying closely.
At present we acquire newspapers in print form. We would like to acquire more newspapers digitally, and newspapers today are produced in digital form (PDF usually) from which the print copy is then generated. But these digital copies are not published as such, consequently they do not qualify as 'publications' and cannot be collected under Legal Deposit. Of course some newspapers are available in digital facsimile form on their websites, which we could collect via our web archiving operation, but the PDFs that are available are of lower image quality (less suitable for preservation), and there is a shrinking number of these, as newspapers turn instead to aggregation services such as PageSuite to deliver their digital copies for them.
So why not just archive the websites? They have the same content as the newspapers, don't they? Well, no they don't. We recently conducted a study in regional newspapers and their web equivalents, to see how similar content was between the two forms. We found that the typical UK regional newspaper, in any one week, had roughly 40% of stories unique to print, 15% unique to online, and 45% that the forms shared (we looked only at news editorial, not advertising, arts coverage or sport). Some newspapers are closer to their web equivalents than others, but in general the two forms are not the same, and are diverging all the more.
|
Title |
Print issue date |
No. of news stories |
% unique to print |
% unique to online |
% shared by both |
|
30/7/2015 |
30 |
46 |
26 |
26 |
|
|
13/8/2015 |
90 |
49 |
34 |
16 |
|
|
23/7/2015 |
72 |
30 |
33 |
36 |
|
|
12/8/2015 |
42 |
55 |
0 |
43 |
|
|
3/8/2015 |
75 |
73 |
13 |
13 |
|
|
21/8/2015 |
51 |
19 |
13 |
66 |
|
|
7/8/2015 |
65 |
4 |
3 |
92 |
|
|
20/8/2015 |
31 |
32 |
3 |
64 |
Analysis of stories published by selected UK regional weekly newspapers
Nevertheless, we are archiving the websites. Since 2013, when non-print Legal Deposit legislation was introduced, enabling the British Library and the other Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland to start archiving the UK Web, we have been gathering in UK news sites. And whereas we archive most UK sites once a year, for news sites we are archiving them on an either daily or weekly basis. It's not just newspaper sites, however - we are capturing web-only news sites, community journalism sites (hyperlocals), news broadcasters' sites, news parody sites and more. We have 1,800 on our list so far, and we are still adding titles. It's not easy to keep track of all of the UK news sites, because there is no definitive list. The numbers keep shifting. Publications such as Benn's Media Directory keep a track of registered news publications on an annual basis, and the handy Local Web List database tries to identify all of the self-produced community journalism sites out there, but, frankly, trying to keep the Web in bibliographic order is like herding ants.
All newspapers and other serial publications in the UK are assigned a unique identifier, the ISSN (similar to the ISBN for books). The ISSN underpins the collecting of newspapers under Legal Deposit in this country, not least because it is key to issuing barcodes. So it is that we manage to keep track with nearly every UK newspaper as it is published.
The problem is that websites don't need barcodes. There is no operational ID system for pinpointing a news site, beyond knowing the URL, and that doesn't help when it comes to keeping track of all different variants, spin-offs (blogs, microsites etc) and other changes that a news site and its digital family may go through. And how do you define what a news website is in any case, if you start to include blogs, hyperlocals, forums and so on?
Then there is the problem of referring to 'news websites', as though capturing these through archiving would be the answer. Newspapers were once the sole form in which printed journalism appeared. Today, newspapers have become apps. News is produced by publishers across diverse platforms which draw their material from content management systems. A newspaper is one such output; a website another; a mobile application another. To build the news archive of the future, we might need to think less of capturing print or digital publications, and more about preserving the engines that have generated them (and the digital content fed into such engines). Then we could generate how the news looked to anyone at a particular place and point in time, according to the applications and devices that would have been available to them.
From print to digital, via Guardian
And that highlights another problem for the future archiving of news. A newspaper is predicated on the understanding that all who purchase it will share in the same news. They might have differing opinions about that news, yet they still share in it.
But news is not like that anymore. News is tailored to the individual, who has increasing editorial control over what news matters to them, as our news content strategy notes. Twitter feeds, Facebook news aggregation, multiple TV news channels, all put the selection of news in the hands of the consumer (even if the algorithms of Facebook and Google do much of that tailoring for us). No one sees the same news any more. This is why the archiving of Twitter is such a conundrum. There is no one Twitter out there - everyone's experience of it is different. How are we to recreate such an experience, to make our future news archives valid?
Theorising over the nature of news is all very interesting, but we have to make practical decisions to ensure that we archive newspapers, their digital derivatives and competitors in a multimedia news market, as thoroughly and efficiently as we can. We continue to take in most UK newspapers in print, and we are close to doing the same with news websites. We archive TV and radio news, albeit selectively. It would help a lot if we knew if and when newspapers are to disappear, but no one does.
Or maybe one person does. Speaking to the Leveson enquiry on 25 April 2012, Rupert Murdoch gave his thoughts on the future of print newspapers.
Every newspaper has had a very good run ... It's coming to an end as a result of these disruptive technologies ... I think we will have both [internet and print news] for quite a while, certainly ten years, some people say five. I'd be more inclined to say 20, but 20 means very small circulations.
And that could be it. Newspapers will last a generation. It may not be an even decline, because what applies to the nationals is not necessarily the same as the regionals. The UK's national newspapers, of which there are around 30, attract a particular kind of advertiser and have the potential to reach out internationally (which is what The Independent's owners are pinning their hopes upon). For regional newspapers, of which there are around 100 dailies and 1,200 weeklies, there seems to be a different model operating, one where local advertising combined with consumer loyalty may keep some titles in print for a good while yet, even as the same titles increase their digital foothold (the recent ranking of UK media publications for 2015 by SimilarWeb shows regional publisher like Kentonline, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo among those titles with the highest percentage of mobile traffic share).
The UK's top 10 publications ranked on mobile traffic share, via SimilarWeb
However long it takes, time is running out for print newspapers. It will be our job to ensure that we continue to serve the needs of UK research by increasingly gathering news in its digital forms. We need a smooth transition, with consistency of representation. The challenge is that the mechanisms to do so are not fully in place as yet. The technologies are; the means to ensure capture, identification and continuity are not. But we're working on it.
06 January 2016
Dennis Griffiths, newspaper historian
Dennis Griffiths, journalist and newspaper historian, died on 24 December 2015, aged 82. He worked for over forty years in the regional and national UK press, serving as production director at the London Evening Standard, and research and development director with Express newspapers. However, he is best known for the histories of British newspapers that he produced upon his retirement, and for his dedicated efforts towards promoting appreciation of newspaper history, which included working closely on several occasions with the British Library.
Dennis Griffiths (the facsimile colour picture of the Moon landing was a famous coup by which he enabled the Evening Standard to scoop the rest of Fleet Street)
If you go behind the scenes at the British Library and see the desks of the Newsroom reference staff, you will see that each one features a copy of Dennis Griffiths' The Encyclopedia of the British Press 1422-1992 (1992). This essential reference guide is used constantly by archivists, librarians and academics, with its wide-ranging biographies of journalists, editors and owners, its authoritative entries on individual newspapers, and its essays on aspects of newspaper history and the work of newspaper-related organisations.
His best-known work, however, is Plant Here the Standard (1996), a definitive and much-praised history of the Evening Standard. His other works included Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press (2006), an exhaustive history of the newspaper press in London, published by the British Library, and most recently Blum & Taff: A Tale of Two Editors (2013), his story of the newspaper editors R.D. Blumenfeld and H.A. Gwynne, produced by his own Coranto Press.
His Fleet Street book was produced to accompany the British Library's 2006 exhibition on newspaper history, The Front Page, marking the centenary of the Newspaper Publishers Association. He served as a lead curator for the exhibition and made use our offices at the former British Library Newspapers building in Colindale. He was a member of the Library's Consultative Group on Newspapers in the 1990s, and made a generous donation of several items from his private reference collection of works on the history of journalism and the press for the then Newspaper Library Reading Room reference collection, a number of which remain on open access in the Newsroom at the British Library's St Pancras building. He also carried out a feasibility study into the Heritage Lottery Fund bid for what would become the Newsplan 2000 project to microfilm endangered newspapers in libraries across the UK.
The newspaper-style background guide to the British Library's 2006 exhibition The Front Page
Between 1999 to 2002 Griffiths served as Chairman of the London Press Club, which operates as a society for journalists and through which he did much to promote newspaper history, including helping to organise the unveiling by the Prince of Wales of a plaque to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first British regular daily newspaper (The Daily Courant).
Newspapers history has been served greatly by Dennis Griffiths' dedicated and scrupulous research and commitment to public understanding. We here in the British Library's news collection lament his passing and are grateful for all the help that he provided for so many years.
Tributes have been paid to Dennis Griffiths by the Evening Standard, Roy Greenslade at The Guardian, The Independent, the Telegraph, the Society of Editors, and the London Press Club. The greatest tribute will come from students for many years hence who will be able to rely on his research and his reference works.
24 September 2015
Mining the FT
We're pleased to announce a partnership with the Financial Times to open up its archives to new kinds of research. The business news daily newspaper has been running since 1888, and has a wealth of information on national and international economic news, and in recent years reporting on general news, the arts and society. Its digital archive is available in the standard search-and-browse manner to institutional subscribers via Cengage Gale, but the newspaper is interested to explore different ways to makes its archives available, with an emphasis on what can be done with its data.
The full digital archive runs 1888-2010 and comprises 903,029 pages from 37,464 print editions. However, the collaboration is starting off with a relatively small amount of content, which may expand later. The FT has agreed a licence which permits use of the data for academic research purposes, either onsite at the British Library or via controlled remote access.
Four complete sample years of FT pages images (as JPEGs) and data (XML) are being made available to research teams: 1888, 1939, 1966 and 1991. The licence runs to the end of 2015, when we will review what has been learned and will see how access and use may be extended thereafter. So the sample years would be ideal for researchers developing data-driven projects who need some test content to scope future plans, or to test tools or applications that they may be developing.
Anyone who is interested should get in touch with Luke McKernan, Lead Curator News & Moving Image at the British Library, who can provide further details. Research teams may also be interested be to take part in the Library's first news hackathon, scheduled for November 16th, which will include FT data alongside data derived from the Library's own news collection. More news on this will be published soon.
The collaboration with the Financial Times is one part of emerging plans for British Library news data. The structure of news content offers numerous opportunities for analysing, interrogating, visualising and rethinking what news archives today, as well as creating new kinds of newspaper and and other news media history. We held a news data workshop on September 7th, where we brought together researchers, developers and content owners to look at ways we might develop plans for news data that would best benefit researchers. There's a report on the workshop on our Digital Scholarship blog.
We will hope to be issuing news on further news archive datasets that we can make available for research in the near future.
The Newsroom blog recent posts
- 200 years of collecting newspapers
- World newspaper data from the British Library
- Caroline, Byron and Wilde: celebrity scandal in the 19th century
- Encountering the news
- Visualising Victorian News
- Breaking news on Breaking the News
- 400 years of British newspapers
- Free to view online newspapers
- Extending the partnership
- Researching short-lived newspapers
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