Shipping news

Abstract

Reports on the movement of shipping vessels in and out of English harbours have appeared as newsworthy items among English news reports from the very beginning of English newspaper publication. The earliest examples in the ZEN Corpus, which was used for this study, date from 1671. As shipping news grew in importance they acquired the status of a separate text class and were printed with specific headlines, such as SHIP NEWS, PORT NEWS, or HOME PORTS. This paper describes the beginnings of the text class as colourful reports, its growth during the 18th century, and its apparent decline towards the end of the century, when it became more and more formulaic and telegraphic in style and moved away from news reports to the advertisement section.