In the studies that there have been on the press in Iran of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, newspapers have been, for the most part, evaluated only in terms of the degree to which they enabled activism and brought about a ‘new kind of politics.’ This has resulted in the conventional wisdom that there were no newspapers in Iran worth examining until the granting of the constitution in summer 1906, when a temporary lifting of censorship relaxed many of the restrictions on the press, giving way to the appearance of a large number of political dailies. As a result, the newspapers that appeared in Iran since the 1850s have been largely ignored as insignificant and inconsequential because they were too close to the state. My contention, here, is that early newspapers should not be dismissed out of hand. Not only did their appearance represent a sign of the change that the country was going through, but also and more importantly, they played a role in forging a newspaper culture, and laying the building blocks for an emerging public and a nascent public sphere. To this end, this paper will consider the cases of two lesser-known, privately-owned weeklies that were published in Iran in the years that preceded the Constitutional Revolution, more specifically between 1896 and 1906. They are 'Tarbiyat' (Education), and 'Adab' (Culture). They were semi-independent newspapers in the sense that while they were subject to censorship and answerable to the Ministry of Publications, in as much as they were privately-owned, they had to find their own sources of funding either in the shape of benefactors, or they had to sell enough copies of their newspaper to make ends meet. This paper will therefore consider the different ways in which these two newspapers tried to create and win over a reading public, and in so doing, not only gave currency to the idea of a public, but also played a part in giving shape to a newspaper culture.