In the social discourse from the end of the Second Empire to the Belle Époque, the image of the street, the theatre for news items and tragic domestic events, is a necessary one in order to account for the rapidly increasing activity of journalism and reporting. As crowds descend in the streets, the reporter emerges as a mediator at the heart of another democratised “public space”, that of the newspaper, a role which becomes stronger between the two world wars. Whether the reporter is considering the street as paced by the crowds during social strife, the streets as battered by the road-works of a developing urbanism, or the street as the place for wanderings filtered through literary and artistic musings, the street now reveals the role s/he himself has in society. In the analogy between the street and journalism can be seen to converge the manifestations of a democratic, technological and aesthetic modernity whose significations this paper explores.