THE MANAGEMENT OF A VICTORIAN LOCAL NEWSPAPER: the Manchester City News, 1864–1900.

The article focuses on the management of the Victorian local newspaper. While Victorian journalism has received a great deal of attention from historians its commercial aspect has been relatively neglected. The development of a few of the larger enterprises has been explored, but still little is known of the detailed organization and management of a Victorian provincial paper. The Victorians themselves recognized that the commercial aspect was vital to the whole institution of the Press, and the newspaper proprietor was commonly accorded a higher status than the mere journalist. Business records, however, are particularly vulnerable to the passing of time, and those of newspaper enterprises have also been subject to a more than usual proclivity for secrecy on the part of the proprietors. Further losses occurred as the result of structural change in the industry in the twentieth century. Such records as do survive are, therefore, all the more important, and it is from one such survival that an attempt is made to show how a small provincial paper was conducted.