Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Traditional histories of the Victorian newspaper overlook the key fact that daily newspapers were highly constrained, high-pressure systems. When demand for newspapers outpaced existing production capacity at the turn of the nineteenth century, papers began to build complex technical and organizational mechanisms to grow and compete. As these systems expanded newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news is that the decisions of editors and owners and the larger social forces at work in that era were not the only or even the primary drivers of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news acquired major shaping agency over their own development. Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines reconstructs the systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail, offering new and counterintuitive account of when and why daily papers expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was organized.</jats:p>