ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the dual character of journalism today is a construction of one and the same city; this reveal how the same city London in its current iteration is now answerable to two sets of demands, one mainly domestic, the other largely international. Journalism and mercantilism were twins of the early eighteenth century; each entailed the construction of a third position from which to compare the two entities which the third always alluded to, whether these entities were ideas, interests, individuals or commodities. The possibility of the same people engaging with both varieties of journalism was given by their dual existence both on the plane of interpersonal relations and as a participant in the general relation between productive capital and labour. The continuum encompassed as much of the surface of the globe as contained within the borders of the British Empire, so that Calcutta and Cape Town, Nairobi and Kingston, were all linked via London and its journalism.
