"Freshest advices"?: the currency of London news in Dublin City newspapers, 1790 - 1801

Authors

  • Sarah Catherine McDonald

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/lirg251

Keywords:

newspapers, information currency, information dissemination, digital surrogate, foreign intelligence, packet ship, mail, news

Abstract

This paper summarises a MLIS dissertation which studied the currency of news, sourced from London newspapers and re-printed in Dublin City newspapers, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. London was a vital communications network hub for the dissemination of information, consisting of British and Foreign Intelligence, to Irish port cities such as Dublin. Using the resources of recently digitised London and Dublin newspaper series, it was possible to build a model which accurately represents the transmission time for London 'News' into Dublin editorial offices. The model provides a frequency distribution from which the minimum, maximum and average transmission times are established. It is argued that the same method can reliably be applied to determine the transmission time for news from the main European cities to London and Dublin.

Author Biography

Sarah Catherine McDonald

Sarah McDonald graduated from University College Dublin in 2010 with a first class Master of Library and Information Studies degree. Previously, she was Head of Information Systems in the private sector.

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Published

2011-01-16

Issue

Vol. 34 No. 108 (2010)

Section

Invited Contributions

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