Conclusion

Abstract

As Joseph Gales described in the first edition of his Sheffield Register, producing a successful newspaper required a fine balance of careful composition that was sensitive to readers’ tastes and ready to combat rival opinions, as well as hard work and financial investment. For this, he or she was rewarded with an income for the family and with the knowledge that a newspaper provided a service that was of benefit to society. The creation of a newspaper, then, was by no means a solitary task, but one that involved the family and the community. As this book has shown, moreover, in order to offset the more ‘arduous, difficult and expensive’ elements of newspaper production, it increasingly involved dealing with other members of the news paper trade and agents, all of whom came to comprise the ‘provincial press’. Whereas in earlier studies, members of the provincial press had remained a nebulous group of individuals who did little more than facilitate readers’ consumption of newspapers, this study has placed them centre-stage. It has revealed them to be a group of entrepreneurial, shrewd and sophisticated businessmen and women, as well as serial business failures, chancers who thought that newspaper production would be an easy money-spinner and those who thought that newspapers offered them an easy route to political influence.

THERE is not, perhaps, any situation or profession, amongst the mechanical part of mankind, that is so much exposed to observation and censure as the Printer of a Newspaper. The various tastes he has to please, the different opinions he has to combat, and the trouble he must necessarily take, render it an arduous, difficult and expensive undertaking; and it may, without presumption, be added, in some degree meritorious—for while the honest industry of some individuals is exerted for the subsistence of themselves and families, community is benefited, and the public receives pleasure, information, and knowledge, from their efforts.¹