The Birmingham Journal was the first newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 known to have been published in Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. Little is known of it as few records remain, but a single copy survives in Birmingham Central Library

Birmingham Central Library

Birmingham Central Library is the main public library in Birmingham, England, and the largest non-national library in Europe. It is managed by Birmingham City Council...

: Number 28, dated Monday May 21, 1733. It is assumed from this that the first edition was probably published 14 November 1732.

Background

The newspaper was published weekly (on Thursday) by local businessman and bookseller Thomas Warren

Thomas Warren

Thomas Warren was an English bookseller, printer, publisher and businessman.Warren was an influential figure in Birmingham at a time when it was a hotbed of creative activity, opening a bookshop in High Street, Birmingham around 1727...

 from his house over the Swan Tavern in the High Street. Among its contributors was Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

, whose work for the Journal while he was lodging with Warren in Birmingham in 1733 was his first original published writing. James Boswell

James Boswell

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson....

 wrote of this in his Life of Johnson

Life of Johnson

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. is a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson written by James Boswell. It is regarded as an important stage in the development of the modern genre of biography; many have claimed it as the greatest biography written in English...

:
Publication of the Birmingham Journal is known to have ceased by 1741.

Johnson's role

There is no physical record that documents to what extent Johnson played a part in the making of the Journal. It is known that Johnson was asked by Warren to work on the paper, and that Warren respected the extent of Johnson's knowledge to the point that he wanted to harness it for the Journal. There was an old tradition among the Birmingham bookselling community that Johnson was an "assistant" to Warren and that Johnson wrote several of the essays that were printed in the paper. However, this cannot be verified because none of the papers printed during the months that Johnson could have worked on the Journal have survived.