Print Journalism

A Critical Introduction

Richard Keeble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134243495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Print Journalism provides an up-to-date overview of the skills needed to work within the newspaper and magazine industries.

This critical approach to newspaper and magazine practice highlights historical, theoretical, ethical and political debates and includes tips on the everyday skills of newspaper and magazine journalists, as well as tips for online writing and production.

Crucial skills highlighted include:

• sourcing the news
• interviewing
• sub editing
• feature writing and editing
• reviewing
• designing pages
• pitching features

In addition separate chapters focus on ethics, reporting courts, covering politics and copyright whilst others look at the history of newspapers and magazines, the structure of the UK print industry (including its financial organization) and the development of journalism education in the UK, helping to place the coverage of skills within a broader, critical context.

All contributors are experienced practicing journalists as well as journalism educators from a broad range of UK universities.

Part I
Context

History, structure and business of print media

1
The print industry – yesterday, today and tomorrow

An overview

The print industry – yesterday, today, tomorrow

An overview

Martin Conboy

Newspapers and magazines share many features in their historical development. Both have needed to combine an astute understanding of readership to survive financially. Both have appreciated the need for variety and entertainment. Too often, historical surveys of journalism have focused solely on its primary political function, which is to inform the public, and have, therefore, neglected its secondary but complementary function, which is to engage with the broader lifestyle and entertainment requirements of the readership. In its secondary function, journalism has contributed enormously to a wider cultural politics. In short, journalism in both printed formats is best seen as the continuous recombination of novelty, information, opinion and entertainment.

Early periodical publications

The emergence of periodical information in print accompanied broader cultural changes already evident across much of Western Europe during the seventeenth century (Burke 1978). These involved a greater emphasis on the specifics of time and place, more interaction in literary forms between protagonists and narrative and, above all, more sense of the potential for human agency in social affairs. In its earliest forms, periodical print culture incorporated a struggle between those who wanted to control the flow of public information and those who wanted to disseminate it, whether for political or commercial purposes.

Periodical newsbooks and news sheets began to spread across the cities of Europe from 1609 and reached England in 1621 with the publication of the first coranto translated into English. The first dated and sequential newsbooks began to be published in England the following year. The sort of writing distinguishing newsbooks from other literary forms centred on the transitory and the contemporary. And while it foregrounded the political, it also sought to surprise and entertain. But the element of the newsbooks that distinguished them from previous forms of information was their regularity, which Sommerville has described as ‘periodicity’, without which no journalism industry could have developed (1996: 4). This meant that a commercial dominant was always the driving force behind innovation in print journalism, and this attracted printers and publishers to invest in it to make a profit.

After the fall of the Star Chamber on 5 July 1641, the authority of the monarch over printing in England was in tatters, and the newsbooks of the 1640s were the first publications to be able to break the taboo on reporting parliament. The first such publication was The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament from 22–29 November 1641, written by Samuel Pecke and published by John Thomas. The years of the English Civil War (1642–51) saw the birth of many techniques of modern political journalism: for instance, the planted item, the inadequately denied rumour, the inside story (Frank 1961: 54) plus, in a world of endemic parliamentary and aristocratic corruption, another staple of journalist-manufactured news, the exposé (Mendle 2001: 58).

To boost the authenticity of descriptions and reports of speeches, an early form of shorthand was developed by John Farthing that allowed varying accounts of an event to be synthesised by cross reference. From 1643 the mercuries introduced satirical writing and scurrilous innuendo about public figures and overt political propaganda in the first regular attempts to create a public forum through a consistently partisan idiom in print. Their power and reach increased as their reputation for accuracy and probity declined. The newsbooks and mercuries contained an impressive range of content from poetry to plays, which all formed part of a broad commentary on public life that was both informative and entertaining.

The period also witnessed the first experiments with advertising in periodicals. Advertising had started as a strategy by printers to use up empty space by placing announcements in their newsbooks for other publications of theirs, from books to pamphlets. But the practice soon developed a lucrative momentum of its own, enough for the publishers to be able to canvass for external advertisements to boost their revenue. It would not be long before the interdependence of advertising and news became a characteristic combination of print journalism with all the benefits and compromises this brought.

Siebert has concluded that by the time of the Commonwealth (1649–51): ‘Journalism, controlled or uncontrolled, had become a permanent social and political phenomenon’ (1965: 220). Readers were being targeted not only as participants in political and broader cultural life but also as consumers who could deliver profits to the printers and publishers. This meant the new medium was not solely political but part of a generic hybrid between public information source, topical entertainment, communal identity and profit that together constituted journalism.

The formation of a public sphere

By the Restoration in 1660, there was a return to central and licensed control over print journalism but, even under repressive conditions, the logic of this embryonic culture of periodical communication was to find ways of renegotiating its public presence. Harris and Lee (1978) suggest there was at this point no political or commercial drive to produce journalism for a wider audience, although there was clearly a readership for it. The scale of this potential readership was demonstrated by the wide circulation of ephemeral publications such as broadsides, chapbooks and ballads as the mainstream press was forced by legislation and the need for economic stability to concentrate on the respectable commercial classes for its constituency. Ultimately, such a division was always going to be too restrictive for the commercially orientated and generically varied practice of journalism.

The term ‘newspaper’ is first used in 1670, and as a specific form of print culture it begins to take on its identifiable characteristics. From the Restoration onwards, we see the historical crystallisation of the bourgeois class and its expression in print, which Habermas has identified as the public sphere (1992). The Licensing Act lapsed in 1695 not because the ruling political classes felt secure about unrestricted printing but because it could no longer be administered efficiently. Yet as the era of direct censorship and control ended, a new one began where the financial preferment of ministers played more of a role in establishing which publications would gain financial stability. First Harley and then Walpole established a system of bribes, preferential access to news and sponsorship for newspapers and periodicals that they felt presented their ministry in the best light. There was, nevertheless, a wide range of experimentation in journalistic form with the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appearing in 1702. Barbers’ shops, taverns and especially coffee shops all formed part of a spreading national network of outlets for newspapers and periodicals where people gathered informally to read, exchange opinion or catch up on the latest rumour or gossip.

The gathering reputation and impact of journalism came not through the newspapers at this point but through the literary and political periodicals of the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). These flourished in the years between the lapsing of the Licensing Act and the imposition of Stamp Duties in 1712. During this period the main contributors to the development of journalism were Daniel Defoe’s Review, Jonathan Swift’s Examiner and Steele’s and Addison’s Tatler and Spectator. Defoe’s publication was typical of the hybridity of these experimental periodicals, including an essay on foreign politics and a satirical section on contemporary affairs. It was not in any way a newspaper but more a reinvigorated form of political essay sheet with a humorous edge to some of its writing. It revived the tradition of political persuasion on many matters of economic and military policy in tightly argued, accessible prose as well as mocking the faults of other political commentators.

Richard Steele’s Tatler, begun in 1709, was originally even more of a hybrid than Defoe’s periodical. Published as a thrice weekly, like many of the newspapers of the time, it covered news for its first eighty-three editions. From 1711 Steele joined forces with Addison to produce the Spectator as a daily publication. Both these periodicals sought to educate the bourgeoisie in the ways of a polite society, giving advice and guidance on taste, fashion and behaviour as well as providing opinion on the latest literary productions. Thus by the end of the reign of Queen Anne, journalism had emerged as a new form of social communication that blended political with wider cultural information across a range of publications and representational styles.

The defining legislation structuring this new public sphere of information exchange came with the 1712 Stamp Act and the imposition of advertising duties, which were a shrewd combination of revenue-raising and policing. The consequence of this emergent political economy of journalism was that although newspapers and periodicals had the potential to foster radical political debate, their ownership and intended market made them inherently conservative in their world views if they were to survive politically and economically. The restrictions on the press and the effective political control exerted by Walpole did, however, meet with resistance that was to contribute to the shaping of journalism from an oppositional perspective. Essay journals that provided commentary on political affairs as well as a forum for letter writers to contribute to political debate were popular with readers and, therefore, with advertisers. The provocative ‘Cato’s’ Letters in the London Journal started this trend and it was continued by Mist’s Weekly Journal, Fog’s Weekly Journal and the Craftsman.

Yet for all their provocative polemic it was not these essay papers that attempted to renew the coverage of parliament that had briefly flourished during the Civil War. This was reintroduced by the first named magazine, the Gentleman’s Magazine, founded by Edward Cave in 1731. A digest of news, literary and political comment and, from May 1731, live parliamentary proceedings, this magazine certainly lived up to its motto ‘E pluribus unum’ (Out of the many, comes one).

At first, the novelty of topical information had provided the impetus for the development of newspapers and other periodicals. Steadily, the range of information in circulation was growing so that by the middle of the eighteenth century gossip, shipping news, court reports, social commentary, parliamentary debate and political opinions were all well developed in the newspaper. From the 1750s John Gurney provided a newly systematised shorthand that was able to reinforce journalists’ claims to eyewitness veracity (Smith 1978: 162). In addition to formal politics, the poetry, parables and epigrams that alluded to political affairs made these publications more accessible and entertaining to readers and linked them to more general entertainment values. Advertising became an increasing feature of newspapers throughout the eighteenth century and formed part of the wider system of intelligence, inflected towards the business and political preferences of a narrow section of society. Distinctions sometimes made between the important political content of these newspapers and their trivial and ephemeral features, including advertising, miss the point that a judicious blend of the informative and the entertaining has always been the optimal blend for a successful newspaper written for a broad readership, not just for scholars or politicians.

By the end of the century three daily London-based newspapers had begun to draw together the strands of the extended experiment in newspaper journalism into a successful format. The Morning Chronicle, edited by James Perry, the Morning Post, edited by Daniel Stuart, and The Times were all combining credibility, probity and financial success. The first two were demonstrating the benefits of control of the whole newspaper by one manager although this function was not described as ‘editor’ before 1802. From this point, the financial success of newspapers was to be exploited by owners and editors to emphasise their editorial independence from government. The rise of the leading article was a device that allowed this claim to be demonstrated on a daily basis on the important issues of the day, and increasingly newspapers sought out the best writers to articulate distinctive political and economic arguments for their readership.

As a parallel development to the prestige newspapers of the early century, the reviews, which did much to contribute to and extend intellectual bourgeois opinion, were considered ‘the mandarin periodical form of the 19th century’ (Shattock and Wolff 1982: 5). The Whig Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 as a liberal, reformist organ and this was countered in 1809 by the Tory Quarterly Review, based in London. In 1817, what was to become Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was founded and a radical alternative, the Westminster Review, completed the picture from 1823. Later in the century, the monthlies and then the weeklies took over much of the role of the quarterlies but were aimed at a much broader readership. They fitted more easily into the commercialised environment of the late century than their high-minded and commercially restricted predecessors. The Cornhill Magazine (1860), the Fortnightly Review (1865), the Contemporary Review (1866) and the Nineteenth Century (1877) all provided space for topics that needed more reflection and perspective than a daily could provide, together with a wider range of literary discussion for a more extended leisured class.

The defeat of a radical press

As one set of developments was moving newspapers towards commercial respectability and political independence, a long suppressed radical impulse gained renewed momentum at the start of the nineteenth century. Under the impact of social and intellectual developments linked to the American and the French Revolutions and in the wake of the unemployment and radical social upheavals of the early industrial revolution, readerships were being increasingly politicised along class lines. Newspapers and periodicals began to address their readers in one of two ways: as a market for economic purposes or as a social class for political purposes. Government fears of the impact of revolutionary ideas led them to raise the stamp duty twice between 1789 and 1797, but this merely encouraged the radicals to publish illegally and so raise their oppositional credibility with their readers.

Hollis (1970) has identified two phases to these radical publications: the first identified by an emphasis on the ‘old corruption’ and the second informed by much more of a socialist analysis of class politics and property. The first phase between 1815 and 1819 included the writings of Cobbett, Carlile, Wade and Wooler. This journalism, in the form of a weekly polemic, provided an organic link to their targeted readership, the working classes. Public meetings, subscriptions and boycotts of commodities all encouraged an interaction with an engaged readership. The extension to the public sphere that the radical unstamped publications provided was much more than a space for the polite exchange of political or aesthetic views, it was a crucible in which citizens could become aware of a range of alternative strategies for understanding and changing the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Context
• Part II: Practice
• Part III: More key areas
• Part IV: And finally
• Glossary
• A list of useful web sites