![]() Bingham and Conboy identify three key waves of editorial innovation embraced by newspapers that took on the tabloid characteristics of populism, accessibility and brevity. The introduction to Tabloid Century provides a useful context for helping readers to understand the 20th-century development of the ‘tabloid model’. Furthermore, as the Directors of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield, Bingham and Conboy’s previous work has already extensively and authoritatively contributed to, and provided commentary on, the more recent approach to historical newspapers that places language and content at the centre of the analysis. This is partly because one of the authors’ stated aims was to produce an accessible text that adopts a tone mid-way between the colourful Fleet Street memoirs that they engage with and the more dense academic literature. Although key works in the field are referenced throughout, Bingham and Conboy do not extensively examine these methodological and historiographical developments in Tabloid Century. The feasibility of this approach has been aided by the digitisation of vast numbers of newspapers in recent years. Motivated by the ‘cultural turn’, and the acknowledgement that socio-political identities are often linguistic constructions, Tabloid Century is part of an emerging wave of scholarship that has started to place much greater value upon the language and content of popular newspapers as historical source material. This methodological approach represents a clear shift away from many more traditional press histories, which ‘focus on the production of newspapers – on the owners, editors, reporters and printers who wrote, packaged or paid for the news – rather than on their content’ (p. The main source base for Tabloid Century is the content of the market-leading national daily newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Sun. The book is organized into six main chapters, which examine each of the following themes in turn: war politics monarchy and celebrity gender and sexuality class and race and nation. Tabloid Century is concerned with how the popular press represented key public events, institutions and people in addition to how personal and social identities were portrayed. The popular press was therefore an important, and a highly successful, force in 20th-century British social and political life, shaping how millions of people were informed about, and made sense of, the world around them. ![]() About 85 per cent of the population saw a newspaper everyday by the early 1950s, and the British people read more newspapers per head than any other nation. ![]() The reason why the role of the popular press in 20th-century Britain is deserving of serious and sustained scholarly attention is clearly outlined by Bingham and Conboy in the preface. Indeed, we are told in the introduction that evidence will be provided of ‘when tabloids were progressive and generous, when they provided a powerful voice for ordinary people’, suggesting that ‘tabloid culture is more complex and nuanced than many have given it credit for’ (p. However, setting out to explore broad patterns of continuity and change in popular newspapers over the last century, Bingham and Conboy caution against the drawing of simplistic and stereotypically negative conclusions about the role of the press by referring to the wide range of material that the tabloids contained. ![]() (1) In Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy’s lively and impressive new book plenty of evidence is provided to illustrate the crude focus upon sensation and scandal that has often characterised the popular press since the 1896 launch of Britain’s first morning daily newspaper aimed at the mass market: Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail. As journalist Jonathan Freedland commented, coverage of the incident painted a picture of a popular press that had ‘slipped out of the gutter and into the sewer’. The revelation that the News of the World hacked the phones of individuals including murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler (a revelation that prompting the closure of the newspaper in July 2011) is an example which helps to explain why attitudes towards tabloids are often so negative. Popular newspapers in Britain are commonly criticised for providing unsophisticated, distasteful and intrusive journalism, driven by an aggressive pursuit of exclusives and an unscrupulous desire for profit. ![]()
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