Corporations and Collectives: an Overview of Australian Newspaper Companies, 1860-1920

The intention of this article is to provide an Australia-wide overview of the processes of capitalisation and company formation which overtook the newspaper press from the second half of the nineteenth century. This analysis constitutes the preliminary phase of a larger media history which needs to be written about the corporate successes and failures of the industry Australia-wide. While the main focus of the paper remains the popular press, it will be argued that an understanding of newspaper company history sheds light on a multiplicity of Australia media traditions - not only popular papers but also on their more reputable city counterparts; not only on regional media, where company formation, if uneven, was surprisingly rapid and significant, but equally as a valuable market of labour and radical aspirations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures, the latter constituting an alternative tradition of narrative to the relentless takeovers and mergers of the corporate tradition