George Lukacs and Mikael Bakhtin, two of the most influential novel theorists, provide rubrics through fleshing out what the novel is not in their treatments of the epic and the poem. The press seems to be another competing novelistic discourse, with the novel always aware of and looking towards the newspaper. In recent years, we have come to know a lot about 19th century Ottoman-Lebanese Ahmed Fares el-Shidyāq (d. 1887) as an iconoclast “novelist” whose literary outpouring is polymathic in scope, in part thanks to Humphrey Davies translation of Al-Sāqʿalā al-Sāq (2013). Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to Shidyāq’s latter stages of life, the journalist publishing the largest Arabic newspaper (al-Jawā’ib) from the Ottoman imperial capital for over two decades (1861-1884). The first part of this paper provides a brief review of the scholarship on this figure. It first looks at the Anglophone literature that has overwhelmingly focused on Shidyāq’s earlier stages of his life, relating to postcolonialism, the global novel and modernity. Meanwhile, Arabic language studies of recent decades that have tackled Shidyāq’s latter stage of his life have focused exclusively on the newspaper through the lens of lexicography and intellectual biography. This paper proposes looking at the newspaper through Bakhtinian novelistic theory. It turns to briefly examine the representation of journalism in Leg over Leg before pivoting to a close reading of an issue of al-Jawā’ib. As I argue, al-Jawā’ib reveals a hybridity of the monologic and the polyphonic. Its addressees are less clear than the poem, but clearer than the ambiguous receiver of the novel. Modeled on other newspapers, the press becomes the modernizing vehicle that allows Shidyāq to continue expressing the heteroglossia of the social world while also profiting from its function. He is not as free and language is not as polyphonic as it is in his seminal novel Al-Sāqʿalā al-Sāq, but the ways in which he negotiates running an Empire-sponsored newspaper at a time of incredible censorship and multi-patronage are incredibly artful and complex, challenging prior understandings of Shidyāq and giving us a more complete image of his life. Above all, this paper contributes to a reassessment of Arab modernity (the Nahḍa) that bridges the often-divided fields of Ottoman-Turkish and Ottoman-Arabic studies, bringing the imperial capital to the center of the story for late 19th century Arab-Ottoman intellectual life rather than focusing solely on the Arab provinces or on exilic Europe.