Professor Smyth’s scholarship celebrates a close attention to language, not only evident in his elegant prose but also in his attention to the ways historical changes have been incorporated as language change and language use. In ‘Upheavals in economy, family naming patterns and language, 1530-1750,’ Smyth traced the shifting linguistic tessellation of Irish and English both in naming practices and in the production, destruction, and reception of books. Communication integrates space shaping identities and coordinating action. In this essay I want to examine the early days of the Nation newspaper as a window onto the complex of spaces that served as nationalist politics in late 1842. I shall attend to the shaping of identities by looking at the forms and forums of what we might, after Louis Althusser, call nationalist interpellation, while matters of coordination will be addressed by asking how the newspaper helped organize the nationalist movement. The mutual interdependence of these two sets of tasks will be taken up in the conclusion. I begin with some brief remarks about the general relations between publics and mass media both to identify the broader issues at stake in such a study and also to establish a comparative context for appreciating the significance of Irish developments.