This article presents an outline history of the Polish political press addressed to the younger generation of readers in the years 1899–1918. It contains a summary account of its origins, socio-political contexts, geographical distribution as well as its typological differentiation. The data show that at the beginning of the 20th century that market was dominated by two contenders, the nationalists and the socialists, while titles espousing other ideological and party-political options (the agrarian, the Christian Democrat, or the conservative) were trailing far behind.

Judging by his private diaries, which he kept for 34 years, the press as such was hardly a major concern for Michał Römer (1880–1945), a Polish-Lithuanian aca-demic and politician who occasionally took on the role of editor and journalist. Nonetheless the diaries are an important contemporary source and a veritable mine of information about the multilingual press published in Wilno between 1911 and 1915. In the second part of that decade Römer ceased to be an active player in that scene, but he kept a watchful eye over it and continued to analyze and comment on the dramatic shifts in Poland's and Lithuania's multilingual press market, a process driven by the changing fortunes of war and its political consequences.