Lloyd's List

Lloyd's List is one of the world's oldest continuously running journals, having provided weekly shipping news in London as early as 1734. It was published daily until 2013 (when issue 60,850 was published), and in constantly updated digital format only since then.

Known simply as The List, it was begun by the proprietor of Lloyd's Coffee House in the City of London, England as a reliable and concise source of information for the merchants' agents and insurance underwriters who met regularly in his establishment in Lombard Street to negotiate insurance coverage for trading vessels. The digital version, updated hour-to-hour, and used internationally, continues to fulfil a similar purpose. Lloyd's today covers all information, analysis, and knowledge relevant to the shipping industry, including marine insurance, offshore energy, logistics, market data, research, global trade and law, in addition to shipping news.

Predecessor publications are known. One historian, Michael Palmer wrote that "No later than January 1692, Lloyd began publishing a weekly newsletter, ‘Ships Arrived at and Departed from several Ports of England, as I have Account of them in London... [and] An Account of what English Shipping and Foreign Ships for England, I hear of in Foreign Ports’". However, claims that Lloyd's List is the oldest or second-oldest continuously published newspaper in the world are disputed. The World Association of Newspapers lists three earlier, extant titles.

Research on the history of Edward Lloyd, the founder of the coffee house, was carried out by Charles Wright and C. Ernest Fayle, authors of A History of Lloyd's, published in 1928 and cited by classification society Lloyd’s Register.

The coffee house is first mentioned in 1689 in the London Gazette, when it was based in Tower Street. In 1691, Lloyd moved the premises to Lombard Street, close to the Royal Exchange at the heart of London’s trading activity. It became popular with merchants involved with the shipping industry, attracting a crowd that came regularly for news and gossip that Lloyd collected for clients. Lloyd’s News was published three times a week with no particular emphasis on shipping from 1696 to 1697. However, news continued to be read aloud at the coffee house.

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