Pulling Newspapers Apart

Analysing Print Journalism

Bob Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134094394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism explores contemporary UK national and local newspapers at a significant and pivotal moment in their development when some pundits are busily, if mistakenly, announcing their demise.

The book offers a detailed examination of features which previous studies have tended to neglect, such as editorial formats (News, Op Ed pages, readers' letters, cartoons, obituaries, advice columns, features and opinion columns), aspects of newspaper design (page layout, photographs, supplements, online editions, headlines, the emergence of the compact and Berliner editions), newspaper contents (sport, sex and Page 3, royalty, crime, moral panics and politics) as well as the content of newspapers which is not generated by in house journalists (advertising, TV listings, horoscopes, agency copy and public relations materials).

This innovative and accessibly written collection provides journalism and media students with an invaluable study of newspapers in the digital age.

Part 1
Editorial formats

Chapter 1
News

Jackie Harrison

Introduction

Communicating the news through newspapers has faced constant challenges. From the early seventeenth century to today (in the UK) these challenges have ranged across widespread illiteracy, poor transport and communication networks, active oppression and censorship, burdensome tax regimes, technological constraints and innovations, the concentration of ownership, commercialisation, government meddling, competition from other media and most recently declining circulations and advertising revenues associated with changing news consumption habits. Equally newspapers have, throughout this period, constantly changed their understanding of what is judged to be newsworthy and adopted different ways of telling people the news. Today there coexist different news forms which utilise modes of expression that range from the formal to the vernacular, the serious to the irreverent, the conservative to the progressive and the neutral to the partisan (with some too tendentious to allow easy definition). All of which are pursued in the name of anticipating a newspaper’s readers’ needs and interests. To be blunt, the category of ‘news’ in the UK press constantly evades a concise single definition of what it is and what form it takes.

Pulling newspaper news apart

To begin with the obvious, reporting the news for a newspaper has always necessitated the commercial management of time with issues of design and space. The former in terms of deadlines and of being ‘ahead’ of a competitor, the latter in terms of the particular layout and ‘look and feel’ of the newspaper. While the former is a concern for the latest, or at least a distinctive version of a news event, the latter reflects the fact that newspaper news coexists with other forms of content: photos, graphics, features, television guides, motoring information, columns, fashion pages, lifestyle articles, cartoons, crosswords, sport and so on and must sit aside advertisements. All of which combine to ensure that today’s newspapers are anything but papers solely about news. To accommodate this variety of content newspapers are divided into different editorial formats or ‘books’. Newspaper news is one type of editorial format, which can and does take different forms.

Usually newspapers and their associated form of news are described using a conventional taxonomy which operates according to four different types: (1) newspapers, which are variously referred to as positioned upmarket, also known as broadsheet or qualities (this now includes compacts and Berliner midi-sizes); (2) those which are positioned as middle market also known as popular or black tops; (3) those which are positioned downmarket also known as tabloid or red tops; and (4) those which position themselves as alternative to the mainstream (Atton 2002) and typically refer to themselves as radical, underground or, under special circumstances, samizdat.¹ Unfortunately these four types are each subject to different interpretations, to hybridisation (for example, ‘broadloid’) and to disagreements over what is being described and what exactly is being referred to; they are not the best guide to newspaper news forms. I suggest a different taxonomy consisting of three generic newspaper news forms: discursive, descriptive and tendentious.

Importantly, a discursive newspaper form is not exclusively the preserve of upmarket newspapers, a descriptive form of middle market newspapers and a tendentious form of downmarket newspapers or alternative newspapers. I do not offer arguments that slavishly stereotype each newspaper, or type of newspaper, with only one news form. Rather these terms are used to describe news forms per se. In short, all newspapers can and do regularly change their news forms according to the news events they are covering. This flexible way of telling the news across all newspapers can appear (especially to those concerned with news journalism standards) as a narrowing of some of the traditional differences between newspapers, a point that overlooks the fact that newspapers have retained their own distinctive approach and identity.

Three forms of newspaper news: discursive, descriptive and tendentious

News events are rarely straightforward; they are usually ambiguous and reflect different histories and competing spatial stories and are reported from a particular perspective. Perspective is a way of interpreting the news based upon the claim (made by all newspapers) to both represent and speak for their readers whose worldview they have adopted or try to anticipate. It is in accordance with this worldview that the news is subsequently presented.

With regard to news in the UK there are two dominant versions of the readers’ worldview adopted by newspapers. First, a Burkean kind of perspective, which consists of a traditionalist worldview, is inherently conservative and claims ‘common sense’ as its principal virtue. Second, a Lockean kind of perspective, which consists of a worldview based on a belief in contractual politics and civic mindedness, combined with a sense of activism and protest. It is in accordance to either one of these worldviews that newspapers, to borrow a phrase from Hayek, judge their readers’ concern for issues of ‘law, legislation and liberty’ in the context of a particular news event (Hayek 1973–9). This is not a simple right/left distinction, as recent political history shows, but is essentially how newspapers judge a particular news event and its subsequent relevance to its readers’ interests. Because of the diversity of the UK press no one news event is reported exclusively or independently according to one worldview.

The discursive form of news

Consider the following:

We are not there to bat for one side or the other, but to report on the situation on the ground as we find it. But it makes no sense to report events in isolation from one another, so we strive to place stories within a narrative thread, to provide context to events.

I also owe (almost everything) to those committed journalists, commentators and others who have done so much to bridge the gap between my desk and the world I have tried to present in these pages. Part of my purpose has been to try to work out what it is possible to know about ‘there’ from ‘here.’ These essays are not frontline reports; I can’t claim the privilege of presence. But then few of us can: so how are we to make sense of events that take place around the world in which we are like it or not, involved and implicated? Part of the answer is to do with critical reading but that in turn, is impossible without critical reporting and writing.

The two quotes – the former from Harriet Sherwood (2006, p.14) at the time of writing the Guardian’s Foreign Editor, the latter from the social and human geographer Derek Gregory (2004, p.xvii, but also see Fred Inglis 2002, p.3) – span what I mean by a discursive form of news reporting: critical narrative. This is a form of news that is often said (incorrectly) to be exclusively the preserve of those newspapers described as upmarket, broadsheet or qualities. Essentially for this form, news stories are serious, well researched or sourced, offer analysis and commentary, use experts and are written by specialists. They are independent of ‘official versions of events’ often seeking to expose the limited character of ‘official accounts’ and follow what I have described elsewhere (Harrison 2007) as the logic of question and answer, in which the complex and ambiguous nature of a news event and the way it is officially reported can be addressed, understood and challenged. With this remit discursive news reports are often concerned with a critical relationship to political authority. It is also this form of news, referring to the continuing contemporary use of the phrase ‘Fourth Estate’ and which originally Carlyle (1901, p.152), following Burke, found so admirable.

Discursive news tends to describe itself as covering a hard news agenda that includes as its staple national and international political and economic affairs. It is historically grounded in a tradition of such coverage since The Times, originally called The Daily Universal Register, was established in 1788. Also it is a news form which is comfortable with intellectual or technical issues and is written for a readership perceived to be capable of understanding and following an argument. A readership therefore assumed to be intelligent and educated, people who do not require that everything be explained to them. The language is of equals talking to equals. And the claim (and some would argue the true value of this news form) is that this type of news serves the public interest, helps sustain civil society and its independence from government, and supports the public sphere of democratic debate. It is the home of news written by journalist intellectuals which, to borrow an idea from Bourdieu (1998, p.74), but not his analysis, exists between ‘academic esotericism and journalism “exotericism”’, or in the more readily understandable phrase of C. W. Mills, journalists who possess a ‘sociological imagination’ (1970, p.21), or more mundanely of scholarly hacks (adapted from Hastings 2004).

The descriptive form of news

The descriptive form of news is in one instance neutral and in another reflects and displays support for one of the two worldviews outlined above: to take them in order.

The neutral descriptive news form is expressed by C. P. Scott’s (1921) dictum, ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’,² a view that only makes sense alongside the requirement to be able to obtain the facts and then in a clear and intelligible way report them. Thus according to the descriptive and neutral form of news, the most complex events are expressed in terms of a deliberate reductionism, of complexity to simplicity, achieved by a process of paring down a news event to its core or essential facts. With the neutral descriptive news form news journalism seeks to be reporting without comment or opinion. In this way news journalism achieves one of its most valuable functions, to simply describe events as they are and not as one would like them to be or approve of. In this it is the opposite of tendentious news (see below) and is profoundly antithetical to propaganda. The neutral descriptive news form is usually short, derived as it is from a bulletin style of expression. Sometimes it is referred to as news in brief (nibs), one paragraph long, or it consists of no more than a few paragraphs. At its best, neutral descriptive news is instructive. In essence, short, neutral descriptive news bulletins of events are used when the reader is perceived as requiring no more than a minimum report or accurate summary, or when an event is deemed less important than others. Newspapers use neutral descriptive news of the shorter kind to a lesser or greater extent. See, for example, the ‘World Bulletin’ in the Daily Telegraph and the ‘Briefing’ or ‘World News Digest’ in the Financial Times.

Occasionally the neutral descriptive news form is long, and is written in an accessible, direct and basically informative way. It may use verbatim quotes, a section from a report or public document, or a transcript (for example, the Sun’s ‘Friendly Fire’ Transcript of the cockpit video 6 February 2007). In its longer version it often relies on supporting the detail provided and compiled with graphics and photographs. For example, the front page of the Independent on 6 February 2007 provided a detailed graphic showing the amount and different types of deaths suffered in the Iraq War over 31 days. Accurate description is central to all that this form of news claims to achieve, since the guiding motif is that the facts must speak for themselves and that once we are in possession of these facts we are equipped to know what is going on and, if motivated to do so, then find out about the situation they describe. Often this further detail is supplied within the newspaper itself.

This does not mean that the descriptive news form (especially in its longer version) is always neutral. Letting the facts speak for themselves also produces news reports which are evaluative and judgemental. As noted above, newspapers in the UK claim to represent and speak for their readers in accordance with either a Burkean or Lockean perspective. The former is depicted as belonging to middle England: England’s quiet and silent majority, or in the words of G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936),The Secret People, ‘But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet’.³ The latter is depicted as consisting of a progressively conscientious, motivated and urban citizenry capable of various forms of political and social activism. It is via these different perspectives that newspapers select and choose the facts, which combine to form a descriptive news report. For example, on the 2 February 2007 The Times ran a story in which the readers are told that, ‘Adultery in the Archers is a scandal too far as 200,000 listeners switch off’. The story is backed up with plenty of facts and figures supplied by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd) and reflects a traditionalism and moral propriety that any conservative would approve of. On the same day the Independent’s front page provides a detailed graphic on the types and number of deaths in Iraq in January, from which the reader is directed to longer news reports full of facts and figures, the call to protest at the Iraq War is palpable. Both stories are factual, descriptive and accurate and yet both ensure that the particular worldview of their readers is reaffirmed. This is not dishonestly or surreptitiously undertaken; rather it is the employment of a perspective, which is judged to be one that serves the readers’ real and genuine interests and needs.

Unfortunately the use of perspective in the name of readers’ worldviews and their interests can easily become attenuated (or distorted) into a tendentious news form, which while making the claim to serve the interests of the public, is in fact more interested in advocacy, sensationalism and entertainment.

The tendentious form of news

The movement away from the descriptive forms of news is most clearly manifest when news becomes the direct advocacy of a specific cause (to be distinguished from the consistent interpretation of news from a certain perspective and subsequent worldview), or offers to explain events in terms solely of the personal, socalled human interest stories. These promote the view that to show people as they are in their personal lives is to reveal the true motives or causes for events being as they are.

Tendentious news based upon the direct advocacy of a specific cause adopts a campaigning and universalistic style – it is aimed at persuading everyone. Thus, theDaily Express ran a campaign entitled ‘New Inheritance Tax Crusade’ (2 February 2007, pp.1 and 9). A crusading style is one that at one time or another is taken up by almost all newspapers. When a newspaper campaigns it is obvious: the cause is clearly and stridently announced, the paper seeks to actively elicit support, devotes prominent positions in the paper to its advocacy and opts for a didactic tone. Campaigns in newspapers have a long history and can range from the high minded and well intentioned, to the sentimental and mawkish, and the genuinely unpleasant. Campaigns can have mixed effects. The campaign by the News of the World since 2000 for a law, popularly referred to as ‘Sarah’s Law’, to allow public access to the Sex Offenders Register, also resulted in hundreds of residents taking to the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Newspapers: trends and developments
• PART 1 Editorial formats
• PART 2 Editorial contents
• PART 3 Newspaper design
• PART 4 Non-editorial contents