A Satirical News Aggregator in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

International audienceA satirical weekly paper called the Grub-Street Journal ( GSJ 1730–1737) offered an innovative approach to managing the flow of unverified and contradictory reports that accompanied the growth of newspapers in eighteenth-century London. Using the fictional persona of ‘Quidnunc’ (a contemporary term for news addicts), the editor Richard Russel compiled accounts of the same event from several newspapers and juxtaposed them on the page, thereby revealing their similarities and differences. Russel’s manual version of news ‘aggregation’ exposed errors and contradictions, but it also provided readers with details that would have otherwise required consulting several sources. Meanwhile, Quidnunc interjected ironic remarks, poking fun at the pretensions of news writers, politicians, and others. Anchored in the literary culture of its time, and drawing on learned traditions of textual editing, the GSJ offered readers an eighteenth-century version of media criticism through satire

Communication in Colonial North America

“…Similarly, studies on newspapers and printing tend to begin during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Some notable examples include: Thomas Leonard's The Power of the Press , Charles Clark's The Public Prints (), Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print (), Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors (), Uriel Heyd's Reading Newspapers , Carol Sue Humphrey's The American Revolution and the Press (), Steven Smith's An Empire of Print , as well as articles by William Slauter (). The historiography on British, French, and later American print culture during the late colonial period is so vast and diverse that it has been the subject of several History Compass articles and cannot possibly be included in full detail here (Raymond, ; Peacey, ; Nerone, ).…”