Walter Ruddiman (1719 – 6 June 1781) was a Scottish printer, publisher and newspaper proprietor based in Edinburgh.
Walter Ruddiman moved to Edinburgh sometime shortly after 1745 and was eventually admitted as a burgess of the city on 11 September 1754.
It was a weekly broadsheet which commercially described itself as a digest of "all the Magazines, Reviews, Newspapers, &c. published in Great Britain [...] being a Register of the Writings and Transactions of the Times"; a description that allowed Ruddiman to avoid the stamp duty carried at that time by newspapers but not by literary periodicals.
[1] In the later 1770s, the Weekly Magazine was brought to the notice of the London exchequer for carrying news articles, making it liable for tax.
Although these developments had the effect of splitting the readership in terms of circulation, the aggregate of the sales for both publications remained solid in the region of 3 to 3.5 thousand.