“Get the News! Get the News!” — Speed in Transatlantic Journalism, 1830–1914

Abstract

On the morning of July 29, 2005 Muktar Said Ibrahim was arrested in west London on charges of attempting to detonate a bomb on a bus in Shoreditch two days earlier. This dramatic, tense confrontation between the police and a man accused of involvement in the second of London’s terrorist incidents in the summer of 2005 was witnessed live on television by millions of viewers. It had the virtue and excitement of immediacy — an instant compression of time — and seemed centuries removed from the leisurely tempo of nineteenth-century print journalism when most news, even with the use of the telegraph and telephone, took more than a day to reach its audience.¹ In the July incident speed had caught up with reporting, and in a curious, almost cosmic way, transcended it.