Press (pronounced pres)
(1) To act upon with steadily applied weight or force.
(2) To move by weight or force in a certain direction or into a certain position.
(3) To compress or squeeze, as to alter in shape or size.
(4) To hold closely, as in an embrace; clasp.
(5) To flatten or make smooth, especially by ironing.
(6) To extract juice, sugar, etc from by pressure.
(7) To manufacture (phonograph records, videodiscs, or the like), especially by stamping from a mold or matrix.
(8) To exert weight, force, or pressure.
(9) In weightlifting, to raise or lift, especially a specified amount of weight, in a press.
(10) To iron clothing, curtains, etc.
(11) To bear heavily, as upon the mind.
(12) To compel in another, haste, a change of opinion etc.
(13) Printed publications, especially newspapers and periodicals. Collectively, all the media and agencies that print, broadcast, or gather and transmit news, including newspapers, newsmagazines, radio and television news bureaus, and wire services.
(14) The editorial employees, taken collectively, of these media and agencies.
(15) To force into military service.
1175-1225: From the Middle English press & presse
(throng, trouble, machine for pressing) from the Old French, from presser (to press) from the Latin pressāre, frequentative of premere (past participle pressus). In Medieval Latin it became pressa (noun use of the feminine of pressus). The noun press (a crowd, throng, company;
crowding and jostling of a throng; a massing together) emerged in the late
twelfth century and was from the eleventh century Old French presse (a throng, a crush, a crowd; wine
or cheese press), from the Latin pressare. Although in the Late Old English press existed in the sense of "clothes
press", etymologists believe the Middle English word is probably from
French. The general sense of an "instrument
or machine by which anything is subjected to pressure" dates from the late
fourteenth century and was first used to describe a "device for pressing
cloth" before being extended to "devices which squeeze juice from
grapes, oil from olives, cider from apples etc". The sense of "urgency; urgent demands of
affairs" emerged in the 1640s. It
subsequently proved adaptable as a technical term in sports, adopted by weightlifting
in 1908 while the so-called (full-court press) defense in basketball was first
recorded in 1959. Press
is a noun & verb, pressingness is a noun, pressing is a noun, verb &
adjective, pressed is a verb & adjective and pressingly is an adverb; the
noun plural is presses. The now archaic
verb prest was a simple past and past participle of press.
Installed originally in the 1930s to print
the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, the apparatus is some 9 metres (29½ feet)
high and 9½ metres (31 feet) long, weighing 140 tonnes (154 short tons). Given the bulk, the museum's management have good reason to make this exhibit permanent. Although considerably more intricate than the
printing presses of 500 years earlier, the operators of those would still have recognized
and understood the processes and mechanisms.
The specific sense "machine for printing" was from
the 1530s, extended by the 1570s to publishing houses and to publishing
generally (in phrases like freedom of the press) from circa 1680 although
meaning gradually shifted in early 1800s to "periodical publishing; journalism". Newspapers collectively came to be spoken of as "the press" simply because they were printed on printing presses and the use to mean "journalists collectively" is attested from 1921 but this has
faded from use with the decline in print and the preferred reference has
long been “the news media”, Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) helpfully distinguishing between the news media (those agreeing with him) and the fake new media (those not). The first
gathering called a press conference is attested from 1931, though the thing
itself had been around for centuries (and in some sense formalized during World War I (1914-1918)) although a politician appears first to have
appointed a “press secretary” as late as 1940; prior to that there was some reluctance among politicians to admit they had people on the payroll to "manage the press" but the role long pre-dates 1940.
The term “press release” (an official statement offered to a newspaper and
authorized for publication) is from 1918 although the practice was of long-standing. The sense "force into military (especially naval) service"
emerged (most famously in the “press-gang” (a detachment under
command of an officer empowered to press men into public service)) in the 1570s,
an alteration (by association with the verb press) of the mid-fourteenth century
prest (engage by loan, pay in advance
(especially in reference to money paid to a soldier or sailor on enlisting),
from the Latin praestare (to stand
out, stand before; fulfill, perform, provide), the construct being prae- (before) + stare (to stand), from
the primitive Indo-European root sta-
(to stand, make or be firm). The verb was
related to praesto (ready, available). The concept of "press ganging" to obtain men for military service is ancient but in the codified way it was done by the Royal Navy it remains the Admiralty's greatest contribution to HRM (human resource management).
Rupert
Murdoch (b 1931), Fleet Street, London, 1969.
Mr Murdoch is pictured with one of the first copies of the new
The Sun newspaper, “
hot
off the press”, the print-run in November 1969 the first since his acquisition of the title. Ownership of the
The Sun proved handy because, after being compelled to close the long-running
News of the World in the wake of the "phone hacking scandal", in 2012 Mr Murdoch created a Sunday edition of
The Sun, meaning he needed to maintain only one 7-day tabloid rather than two (and the two titles were more similar than they were different); once again, following a crisis, things worked out rather well for Mr Murdoch. It
was Mr Murdoch who added the topless “
Page 3 girls” to the Sun, prompting one media analyst to conclude: “
Well, Rupert
Murdoch has found a gap in the market, the oldest gap in the world”.
In 1969, the phrase “hot off the press” was literal because the old “hot type” presses used the heat in the hand-assembled metal plates to complete the chemical process by which ink end up on paper. Prepared
even to sustain loss-making mastheads if he thinks their continued existence
fulfils some useful purpose (such as “influence” or “agenda-setting”), Mr Murdoch clearly retains some residual affection for the print titles on which he built his empire(s)
but the old expression “printer's ink in his veins” now is nuanced
because although his papers still consume much ink and paper, more than anyone
he was responsible for the demise of the old “hot type” printing presses which
had evolved over centuries. Modern
newspapers still are printed with a form of ink but, mostly using a process called web
offset printing (a variant of offset lithography, optimized for speed and high
throughput), that "ink" is so low in viscosity it’s better imagined as a
paste. Usually petroleum or soy-based,
the substance is transferred from a metal plate to a rubber "blanket" and, as the
newsprint (porous paper in continuous rolls) moves through the press, the ink is
applied to the paper as shapes, text and images. The ink’s chemistry is formulated to ensure
absorption into newsprint is close to instantaneous; in this the mix differs
from traditional inks which could take seconds or even minutes to dry to the
point printed paper could be handled without smudging, drying now achieved
almost wholly by absorption and evaporation, not heat-fusing. To gain speed, there was a trade-off in
quality in that being relatively thin, the ink produces less color saturation
than is achieved by what’s used for glossy magazines (which is why newspaper
images look softer or slightly grayish).
That is of course acceptable because newspapers have a short life, an idea encapsulated by the band the Rolling Stones that in 1967 sang “Who wants
yesterday’s papers. Nobody in the world.” although the meaning of
that track was better summed up in the line: “Who wants yesterdays girl.”
Cover girl Sydney Sweeney (b 1997) amply filling the cover of Cosmopolitan's “Love Edition”, January 2026; content providers like Ms Sweeny will help ensure the survival of at least some print titles. A tablet computer and a printed glossy are just two different technologies and whether a magazine like Cosmopolitan or a newspaper like The Economist, reading the physical copy tends to be more pleasing, tactile experience.
However,
just as Mr Murdoch was in the 1980s instrumental in consigning the old printing
presses to the scrapheap (along with a substantial number of the unionized
workforce previously employed to maintain and run them), he’s also seen
technological advances impose not always welcome changes on his business model,
some of the implications of which he discussed in 2006: “To find something comparable, you have to go
back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which,
incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and
aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the
publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are
taking control.” He may have
been too pessimistic because, in the 2020s, watching Mr Murdoch’s Fox News, it’s
not immediately obvious the people have “taken control” and a more glum
analysis suggests the elites merely have done what elites always have sought to do as
conditions shift: keep the strategy, adjust the tactics. Still, although printed newspapers no longer
need to exist, nostalgic types who enjoy the ritualism of reading one spread on
a table while taking a coffee (and maybe even a cigarette) will miss them when
they’re gone so they at least will wish Mr Murdoch many more years of rude good
health because whether the print titles will survive his (God forbid) death isn’t
certain. Despite that uncertainty, most analysts seem to believe print in its (possibly diminishing) niches will likely endure. Some of the glossies continue to
flourish and encouragingly, the pleasingly quirky automotive site Petrolicious (revived
after being acquired by the duPont Registry Group in 2024) has brought back its
printed, tabloid size monthly Petrolicious Post (US$9.00 cover price, US$108.00 annual subscription), the internet
lowering the costs associated with such projects by permitting direct-to-customer
distribution without the need to supply newsstands.
Most meanings related to pushing and exerting pressure had
formed by the mid-fourteenth century and this had been extended to mean "to
urge or argue for" by the 1590s. The
early fourteenth century pressen (to
clasp, hold in embrace) extended in meaning by the mid century also to mean "to
squeeze out" & "to cluster, gather in a crowd" and by the
late 1300s, "to exert weight or force against, exert pressure" (and
also "assault, assail" & "forge ahead, push one's way, move
forward", again from the thirteenth century Old French presser (squeeze,
press upon; torture)", from the Latin pressare
(to press (the frequentative formation from pressus,
past participle of premere (to press,
hold fast, cover, crowd, compress), from the primitive Indo-European root per-
(to strike)). The sense of "to
reduce to a particular shape or form by pressure" dates from the early
fifteenth century while the figurative (“to attack”) use was recorded some decades
earlier. The meaning "to urge;
beseech, argue for" dates from the 1590s.
The letter-press referred to matter printed from relief
surfaces and was a term first used in the 1840s (the earlier (1771) description
had been "text," as opposed to copper-plate illustration). The noun pressman has occasionally been used to
refer to newspaper journalists but in the 1590s it described "one who
operates or has charge of a printing press" and was adopted after the
1610s to refer to "one employed in a wine-press". A similar sharing of meaning attached to the pressroom
which in the 1680s meant "a room where printing presses are worked"
and by 1902 it was also a "room (in a courthouse, etc.) reserved for the
use of reporters". To press the
flesh (shake hands) came into use in 1926 and a neglected use of “pressing” is as
a form of torture. Under a wide variety
of names, pressing was a popular method of torture or execution for over
four-thousand years; mostly using rocks and stones but elephants tended to be
preferred in South and South-East Asia. It’s
a medieval myth that Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England 1509-1547) invented
pressing but he certainly adopted it as a method of torture with his usual
enthusiasm for such things. Across the channel, under
the French civil code, Peine forte et
dure (forceful and hard punishment) defined pressing. Used when a defendant refused to plead, the
victim would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his
or her chest until a plea was entered, or as the weight of the stones on the
chest became too great for the subject to breathe, fatal suffocation would
occur.
Pressed for
time: Giles Corey's Punishment and Awful
Death (1692), a drawing held by the Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division, Washington DC. Watched
by a presumably approving crowd, the technique was to place stones upon the
board covering the unfortunate soul: The “straw
which broke the camel’s back” principle.
Remembered as a method use
for torture and to extract confessions, the technique of pressing was known often
as “crushing” if used in executions or the unfortunate victim of a pressing
were to die. Giles Corey was a farmer of
81 who lived in south-west Salem village, Massachusetts who had been accused of
witchcraft, then a fashionable charge in Salem (despite the perception, it wasn't only women who were arraigned as witches).
He chose not to enter a plea and simply remained mute in court,
prompting the judges to order the coercive measure peine forte et dure, an ancient legal device dating from thirteenth
century Anglo-Norman law and which translated literally as “a long and hard punishment”; it was used
to persuade those who refused to engage in process to change their mind (ie
forcing an accused to enter a plea). In
the First Statute of Westminster (3 Edward I. c. 12; 1275) it stated (in Sir
Edward Coke’s (1552–1634) later translation):
“That
notorious Felons, which openly be of evil name, and will not put themselves in
Enquests of Felonies that Men shall charge them with before the Justices at the
King’s suit, shall have strong and hard Imprisonment (prisone forte et dure),
as they which refuse to stand to the common Law of the Land.”
Prisone
forte et dure came into use because of the principle in English law that a court
required the accused voluntarily to seek its jurisdiction over a matter before
it could hear the case, the accused held to have expressed this request by
entering a plea. Should an accused
refuse to enter a plea, the court could not hear the case which, constructively,
was an obvious abuse of process in the administration of justice so the
work-around was to impose a “coercive means”.
The First Statute of Westminster however refers to prisone forte et dure (a strong and hard imprisonment) and it does
seem the original intent was to subject the recalcitrant to imprisonment under especially
harsh conditions (bread & water and worse) but at some point in the
thirteenth or fourteenth centuries there seems to have been a bit of mission creep and the
authorities were interpreting things to permit pressing. The earliest known document confirming a
death is dated 1406 but it’s clear that by then pressing was not novel with the
court acknowledging that if the coercive effect was not achieved, the accused
certainly would die. One who might have been pleased the law had moved on from torturing defendants who declined to enter a plea was Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi Deputy Führer 1933-1941). Appearing before the IMT (International Military Tribunal) in the first Nuremberg Trial which heard the cases against two dozen of the surviving leading Nazis, those in the dock all pleaded "not guilty" except Hess who stood at the microphone, said "nein" (no) and walked back to his place. Dryly, the IMT's president responded: "That will be recorded as a plea of 'not guilty'". There was laughter in the court.
Pressed Duck
Pressed
duck (In the French the dish described variously as canard à la presse, caneton à la presse, canard à la rouennaise,
caneton à la rouennaise or canard au sang) is one of the set-pieces of traditional French cuisine and the rarity with which it's now served is accounted for not by its complexity but the time-consuming and labor-intensive steps in its preparation. Regarded as a specialty of Rouen, the creation was attributed to an
innkeeper from the city of Duclair. Expensive and now really more of a set-piece event than a meal, pressed duck in the twenty-first century rarely appears on
menus and is often subject to conditions such as being ordered up to 48
hours in advance or accompanied with the pre-payment of at least a deposit. Inevitably too there will be limits on the number
available because a restaurant will have only so many physical duck presses and
if that’s just one, then it’s one pressed duck per sitting and, given what’s
involved, that means one per evening. Some
high-end a la carte restaurants do still have it on the menu including La Tour
d'Argent in Paris, Philippe Restaurant in Melbourne, Ottos in London, À L'aise
in Oslo, The Charles in Sydney (a version with dry-aged Maremma duck) and Pasjoli
in Los Angeles lists caneton à la presse as its signature dish.
Pressed duck sequence of events: The duck press (left), pressing the duck (centre) & pressed duck (right).
Instructions
(1) Select a young, plump duck.
(2) Wringing the neck, quickly asphyxiate duck, ensuring all blood is retained.
(3) Partially roast duck.
(4) Remove liver; grind and season liver.
(5) Remove breast and legs.
(6) Take remaining carcass (including other meat, bones, and skin) and place in duck-press.
(7) Apply pressure in press to extract and collect blood and other juices from carcass.
(8) Take extracted blood, thicken and flavor with the duck's liver, butter, and Cognac. Combine with the breast to finish cooking. Other ingredients that may be added to the sauce include foie gras, port wine, Madeira wine, and lemon.
(9) Slice the breast and serve with sauce as a first serving; the legs are broiled and served as the next course.
Silverplate
Duck Press (Item# 31-9128) offered at M.S. Rau Antiques (Since 1912) in New Orleans at US$16,850.
According to culinary
legend, the mechanism of the screw-type appliance was perfected in the late
nineteenth century by chefs at the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, the dish
then called canard au sang (literally
“duck in its blood”), a description which was accurate but presumably “pressed
duck” was thought to have a wider appeal.
The example pictured is untypically ornate with exquisite foliate
scrollwork and delicate honeycomb embossing on the base. Although associated with the famous dish, outside
of the serving period, chefs used duck presses for other purposes where
pressing was required including the preparation of stocks or confits (various foods
that have been immersed in a substance for both flavor and preservation).
Pressed
duck got a mention in a gushing puff-piece extolling the virtues of Adolf
Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945
& head of state 1934-1945) which, in the pre-war years, was a remarkably fertile field of journalistic endeavour on both sides of the Atlantic. William George Fitz-Gerald (circa 1970-1942)
was a prolific Irish journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Ignatius Phayre
and the English periodical Country Life published his account of a visit to the
Berchtesgaden retreat on the invitation of his “personal friend” Adolf
Hitler. That claim was plausible because
although when younger Fitz-Gerald’s writings had shown some liberal instincts,
by the “difficult decade” of the 1930s, experience seems to have persuaded
him the world's problems were caused by democracy and the solution was an
authoritarian system, headed by what he called “the long looked for
leader.” Clearly taken by his
contributor’s stance, in introducing the story, Country Life’s editor called
Hitler “one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the century” and noted “the
Führer is fond of painting in water-colours and is a devotee of Mozart.”
Country
Life, March 1936 (both Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) (1893–1946) and Werner von Blomberg (1878–1946; Reichsminister of War 1935-1938)
(1878–1946) were then generals and not field marshals, von Blomberg raised to the rank in April 1936, Göring in February 1938). Göring wearing the traditional
southern German Lederhosen (leather pants) must have been a sight worth seeing.
Substantially,
the piece in Country Life also appeared in the journal Current History with the
title: Holiday with Hitler: A Personal Friend Tells of a Personal Visit with
Der Führer — with a Minimum of Personal Bias”.
In hindsight it may seem a challenge for a journalist, two years on from
the regime’s well-publicized murders of a least dozens of political opponents
(and some unfortunate bystanders who would now be classed as “collateral
damage”) in the pre-emptive strike against the so-called “Röhm putsch”, to keep
bias about the Nazis to a minimum although many in his profession did exactly
that, some notoriously. It’s doubtful
Fitz-Gerald visited the Obersalzberg when claimed or that he ever met Hitler
because his story is littered with minor technical errors and absurdities such
as Der Führer personally welcoming him upon touching down at Berchtesgaden’s
(non-existent) aerodrome or the loveliness of the cherry orchid (not a species
to survive in alpine regions).
Historians have concluded the piece was assembled with a mix of
plagiarism and imagination, a combination increasingly familiar since the
internet encouraged its proliferation.
Still, with the author assuring his readers Hitler was really more like
the English country gentlemen with which they were familiar than the
frightening and ranting “messianic” figure he was so often portrayed, it’s
doubtful the Germans ever considered complaining about the odd deviation from
the facts and just welcomed the favourable publicity.
So, those who complain about the early implementations of consumer generative AI (artificial intelligence) products "making stuff up" to "fill in the gaps" can be assured it's something with a long (if not noble) tradition among flesh & blood content providers whether they be the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda or a working journalist hustling for a dollar. Generative AI is likely for some time to remain in its "early implementation" phase so should be used with much the same approach as that taken by the inspection teams of the US & USSR when auditing the outcomes of various SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreements: "trust but verify". As a
working journalist, Fitz-Gerald became used to editing details so he could sell essentially the
same piece to several different publications, cutting & pasting (then often literally done with scissors and glue-pot) as
required, Current History’s subscribers spared the lengthy descriptions of the
Berghof’s carpets, curtains and furniture enjoyed by Country Life’s readers who
were also able to learn of the food served at der Tabellenführer, the Truite
saumonée à la Monseigneur Selle (salmon trout Monseigneur style) and caneton à
la presse (pressed duck) both praised although in all the many accounts of life
of the court circle’s life on the Obersalzberg, there no mention of the
vegetarian Hitler ever having such things on the menu.
Indeed,
in Erinnerungen (Memories or
Reminiscences) and published in English as Inside
the Third Reich (1969), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect
1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) recalled
that belying the impression of excess created by the regime’s gaudy spectacles
and monumentalist architecture, there was little extravagance at Hitler’s
table, fresh vegetables his single gastronomic indulgence (although his weakness for sweet pastries and cakes has been well documented). Describing things, Speer wrote: “The food was
emphatically simple. A soup, no
appetizer, meat with vegetables and potatoes, a sweet. For beverage we had a choice between mineral
water, ordinary Berlin bottled beer, or a cheap wine. Hitler was served his vegetarian food, drank
Fachinger mineral water, and those of his guests who wished could imitate him. But few did. It was Hitler himself who insisted on this
simplicity. He could count on its being talked
about in Germany. Once, when the
Helgoland fishermen presented him with a gigantic lobster, this delicacy was
served at table, much to the satisfaction of the guests, but Hitler made
disapproving remarks about the human error of consuming such ugly
monstrosities. Moreover, he wanted to have such luxuries forbidden, he
declared. Göring seldom came to these
meals. Once, when I left him to go to
dinner at the Chancellery, he remarked: ‘To tell the truth, the food there is
too rotten for my taste. And then, these
party dullards from Munich! Unbearable.’"
The tabloid press: On 29 November 2006, News Corp's New York
Post ran its front page with a paparazzi photo of Lindsay Lohan (b 1986), Britney Spears (b 1981) and Paris Hilton (b 1981), the snap taken outside a Los Angeles nightclub,
shortly before dawn. Remembered for the classic tabloid headline
Bimbo Summit, the car was Ms Hilton's Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren (C199 (2003-2009)).
The term "tabloid press" refers to down-market
style of journalism designed to enjoy wide appeal through an emphasis on
scandals, sensation and sport, featuring as many celebrities as possible. The word tabloid was originally a trademark
for a medicine which had been compressed into a small tablet, the construct
being tab(let) + -oid (the suffix from
the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the ο
being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached), from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, likeness)).
From the idea of the pill being the small version of something bigger,
tabloid came to be used to refer to miniaturized iterations of a variety of
stuff, newspapers being the best known use.
A tabloid is a newspaper with a compact page size smaller than
broadsheet but despite the name, there is no standardized size for the format
but it's generally about half the size of a broadsheet. In recent decades, economic reality has
intruded on the newspaper business and there are now a number of tabloid-sized
newspapers (called "compacts" to distinguish them from the less reputable) which don't descend to the level of tabloid journalism (although
there has been a general lowering of standards).
The Mean Girls (2004) Burn Book (left) and Lindsay Lohan burning an “inflammatory” tabloid magazine, Lindsay Lohan: The Obsession, GQ Magazine, October 2006.
In Mean Girls, the Burn Book gained its notoriety from being packed with inflammatory comments. In a visual critique of the tabloid press's "obsession" with her (admittedly incident-packed young) life, Lindsay Lohan in 2006 posed for a photo-shoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) for GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly) magazine. Titled Lindsay Lohan: The Obsession, the theme was her as a case-study of the way the “tabloid press” handled celebrity culture, the joke being a magazine with “inflammatory content about her” being literally set aflame, the glossy paper of course being flammable. It’s appears a consensus in the “media studies” crew this aspect of “tabloid culture” peaked in the first dozen-odd years of the twenty-first century, the reasons for that including (1) the period having an exceptionally large cast of suitable subjects, (2) smart phones with HD (high-definition) cameras becoming consumer items meaning potential content proliferated (ie what once would not have been photographed now became available to editors as low cost images) and (3) social media sites not having attained critical mass, all factors which at the time enabled the lower-end glossies to flourish.
