Dallas Liddle, "News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885" (Oxford UP, 2026)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jun 29, 2026 · 56m

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'. Traditional news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As demand for newspapers…