Press and newspapers

Newspapers, although vital to Europe’s commercial and political culture well before 1789, underwent profound changes in the long nineteenth century. Technological, political, social, and communications revolutions transformed their audiences, appearance, content, journalistic style, and political significance. Once a preserve of elites, they were by 1914 a ubiquitous feature of working-class life, and played an important—if intangible—role in shaping the political destiny of Europe. A shift in the economics of newspaper production was central to these transformations, as newspapers—that is, regular, uniformly titled, dated, printed publications containing miscellaneous recent informational reports—evolved from small-scale enterprises into massive capital-intensive industries.