Chapter 10

From adverts to letters to the editor

This article deals with external voicing in early news discourse, focusing on how the function of announcing future events was realised in letters to the editor and classified adverts, using data from the British daily newspaper The Times in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The external voicing of texts announcing future newsworthy events – upcoming cricket and football matches – is interpreted in terms of a participation framework in which the newspaper plays the role of the animator, mediating messages originating elsewhere. It is argued that this arrangement of the communicative situation is related to pre-modern journalistic practices that tended to rely on the aggregation of content rather than editorial processing of information.