Making News ─ The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet

Making News charts the rise and fall of the newspaper as the primary medium for the conveyance of news. The book focuses on two of the most influential media markets in the modern world-Great Britain and the United States between 1688 and 1995.

In 1688, Parliament created institutional arrangements that would hasten the rise of the newspaper as the dominant medium for the circulation of news. In 1995, the National Science Foundation commercialized the Internet, encouraging an astonishing proliferation of information on all manner of topics, including the news. Per capita newspaper circulation had been declining for decades, partly due to shifting social norms, and partly due to the rise of broadcast news. The Internet exacerbated this trend, partly because it provided a cheaper news source, and partly because it quickly became a superior vehicle for advertising, a major source of revenue for newspaper publishers for over two-hundred-years.

However, only rarely has advertising revenue and direct sales covered costs. Almost never has the demand for news generated the revenue necessary for its supply. Non-market institutional arrangements have ranged from direct government subsidies to organizational forms that enabled news organizations to cooperate. From a historical perspective, the large profits reaped by a handful of newspaper publishers in the post-Second World War era were anomalous, and in no sense a baseline for public policy. Never again will the newspaper be the dominant news medium. To guarantee an informed citizenry in the future, it is necessary to understand how the news business worked in the past.

This book is organized around eight essays--each written by a distinguished specialist, and each explicitly comparative. Its theme is the indispensability in both Great Britain and the United States of non-market institutional arrangements in the provisioning of news.

Richard R. John, Professor of History and Communications, , Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University,Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb,Barrister, Inner Temple

Richard R. John is a Professor of History and Communications at Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University. He is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia's Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications.

Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb is sometime Senior Lecturer in History at Keble College and pupil barrister. After completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, he became Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Oxford along with a research fellowship focused on the business of news at Oxford's Said Business School. Silberstein-Loeb's developing interest in law and business then led to an LLB at City University Law School in London and an LLM at NYU Law.