Revolutions in Journalism: W.T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching’

Abstract

A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.T. Stead, a shaper of the newspaper revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, with events at the British Library in London that are revolutionizing our access to print journalism. These events comprise the closure in 2013 of Colindale, the newspaper library building in North London where newspapers were housed, conserved, and read; the removal of most of them to a silo in Yorkshire for storage, improved preservation, and robot retrieval when necessary; and the opening of a newspaper and media reading room in the main British Library building at St Pancras, in the heart of London, where digital and microfilm surrogates of historical newspapers are consulted where they exist, and print versions where they do not. This is not simply a relocation of resources, but a strategic move that reflects the historicizing of print journalism, and its new place in media history. The revolutionary dimension of the changes lies not only in the shift of the default mode of access from paper to surrogate, but in the new context of print journalism in its designated reading room, where the historical press is accessible along with newly collected British Library holdings of contemporary news sources such as digital editions of newspapers, film, video, television, audio, and blogs. Linking these moments are two indexing projects: Stead’s single-minded programme (1890–1912) of mapping what he called ‘the mighty maze’ of press contents in print indexes, and the current digitization of historical serials and development of indexing software for searching their contents. The present chapter has three parts: the first attempts to provide an overview of Stead’s impact on the media of his day; the second discusses his indexing projects and their close relation to his belief in the press itself as the best form of democracy, education, and governance; and the third considers Stead’s legacy and the impact of the continuing digital revolution on our study of historical newspapers and periodicals.