ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by exploring financial journalism in its earliest forms, emphasizing the crucial impact of the speculative boom of the early to mid 1820s. It moves on to the 1860s and 1870s, when crisis and scandal highlighted to the public the fallibilities of financial journalists. During the first companies' boom, which took place in the 1690s, newspapers reported key events such as the formation of the Bank of England and company mergers. The Observer's proprietor, William Innell Clement, purchased one of the leading London dailies, the Morning Chronicle, in 1821, and early the following year, it began publishing market information on most days. The foreign loans were the main focus of investors in the early 1820s, by 1824 attention was beginning to switch to joint-stock companies. The pioneers of the 'new financial journalism' of the late Victorian era, like Duguid and Marks, tended to be rather contemptuous of their predecessors, mocking their boring columns of City reportage.
