The News Machine: Textual Form and Information Function in the London Times, 1785–1885

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and reorganizing staffing and production. Newspaper historians generally explain this era in terms of strategic choices by publishers or the pressures of cultural and historical forces, but a data-mining experiment on the Gale Cengage Times Digital Archive shows that growth of the London Times followed specific patterns characteristic of technological information systems. Better understanding of the history of British newspapers may require more detailed knowledge of their systems for gathering and storing information, and more understanding of how competing subsystems influenced the development of news forms and genres.