The development of the modern British press.

The development of the modern press was facilitated on a technical level by the Gutenberg press, which was initially developed to reproduce bibles, but was modified in the 19th Century to create the rotary press.  This development is credited to Friedrich Koenig, a German who moved to London and there secured funding to develop and patent his design.

By this time presses were being used for far more than reproducing bibles, with pamphlets, books and the first newspapers such as the Daily Courant being produced.

However, it was later that papers assumed the form that they now form here, with the Daily Mail being produced by Northcliffe in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903, which was the one of the first pictorially led daily newspaper to achieve mainstream success.  (Thanks to the efforts of Harry Guy Bartholomew and Hannan Swaffer)

Newspapers faced their first real challenge in the 1920s with the advent and availability of radio.  In the US, newspaper sales were decimated by radio, which was largely unregulated and commercial.  However, in the UK only the BBC were allowed to broadcast and they were given a charter that insisted their programming should educate the British public.  As such, human interest stories and less salubrious subjects were left to the newspapers, which enjoyed continued success.

The Daily Mirror continued to lead the tabloid pack until well into the 1970s.  However, the Daily Mirror tracked the baby boomers as they got older, while a brash young upstart called 'The Sun', under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch saw a gap in the market, targeting the younger generation and concentrating largely on making celebrities out of television presenters and actors from popular soap operas.

The Sun soon overtook the Mirror in terms of circulation, and Rupert Murdoch used the money to purchase a stake in, and build the reputation of Sky Broadcasting.

Will Murdoch continue to rule the airwaves in the age of the internet?  He has the intelligence to make the transition, but may lack the appetite.  Indeed, some of his tweets regarding recent attempts to enforce draconian copyright protections on the internet suggest that he lacks the will to try.  If he does indeed set himself up in opposition to this new age of collaboration, this would be unfortunate for him.  However, I suspect those whose space he would have moved into, if he had embraced this new way of thinking, are breathing a sigh of relief.