Global Tabloid

Culture and Technology

Martin Conboy, Scott Eldridge II, Martin Conboy, Scott Eldridge II, Scott A. Eldridge II, Martin Conboy, Scott A. Eldridge II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367336257
• eBook ISBN: 9781000373080
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

This edited collection brings together a range of contemporary expertise to discuss the development and impact of tabloid news around the world.

In thirteen chapters, Global Tabloid covers tabloid developments in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and both Eastern and Western Europe. It presents innovative research from eighteen expert contributors and editors who explore tabloidization as a phenomenon, and tabloids as a news form. With an awareness of historical dynamics where tabloids played a role in national news media systems, it brings the debates around tabloids as a cultural force up to date. The book addresses important questions about the contemporary nature of popular culture, the challenges it faces in the digital era, and its impact on a political world dominated by tabloid values. Going beyond national borders to consider global developments, the editors and contributors explore how the tabloids have permeated media culture more generally and how they are adapting to an increasingly digitalized media sphere.

This internationally focused critical study is a valuable resource for students and researchers in journalism, media, and cultural studies.

1 Tabloid culture

Parameters and debates

Martin Conboy

Introduction

At the risk of tempting fate or even history, we suggest that there is a spectre stalking the global mediasphere. This spectre is the tabloid. Like any good spectre, it is hard to pin down. Critical neglect has played a part in this. It is a tendency we aim to correct. For a time in the 1990s, discussions of the tabloid or the broader process of tabloidization were lively and used to centre on the changing formats of newspapers. They did not, however, generate enough substance on the possibility that the tabloid had evolved not as a format or even a style of journalism but more as a communicative flow, despite the fact that historical accounts of popular content in print periodicals had illustrated as much. The tabloid even avant la lettre has been a spectre haunting journalism’s past as well as its present since before its obvious modern-day manifestations, and we can see trends associated with it such as sensationalism, trivialization, exaggeration, and sexualization established within popular print culture well before the emergence of the daily tabloid press proper in the early twentieth century. Still further back in time, some of the earliest printed publications in Europe combined many of the elements associated with the later tabloid newspaper. Indeed, historically, we might see the triumph of the daily, predominantly political, commercial, and respectable newspapers of the bourgeois public sphere as deviations from the long-term successful trajectory of the tabloid. This success can be contrasted with most assessments of the tabloid and its associated phenomena which are negative and read like a miasma of bourgeois anxieties concerning taste, gender, class, politics, and sex. Allan claims it can amount to a “stigmatised label” (Allan, 2010: xxxix). Yet the wide variety of substance and tone we see in these examples renders simplified categories of the ‘tabloid’ or ‘tabloidized’ content problematic. These raise multiple questions about definitions of these terms that need to first be resolved if we are to be able to disentangle the conflicting accounts of tabloids’ journalistic value, or the critique of the same.

Questions to ask of a global phenomenon

At this present juncture, where explicit discussion of the tabloid has become blended within broader discussion of emerging media forms and technologies, it is perhaps germane to re-assess the specific dynamics and complexities of the tabloid by asking certain indicative questions. Should we perhaps be considering the digital manifestation of the tabloid newspaper, trends of tabloidization within news media, or a broader tabloid culture that transcends individual media formats such as ‘news’? Is the process of tabloidization merely a further intensification of discursive reality symptomatic of current media activity? Have we entered a golden age of tabloid culture, or, rather, can we interpret tabloid culture anew as the primary way of understanding modern journalistic culture?

Most research on the tabloid has concentrated on specific national variants, especially the Anglo-American. This introduction attempts to set the scene for a revision of that tendency. The contributors in this volume consider the state of tabloid journalism and related tabloid culture on six continents in order to reflect on whether the tabloid genre has continued to permeate contemporary culture and consolidate itself within emergent socially mediated communication forms. This book draws on the rich history of tabloid culture to emphasize continuities within popular journalism while situating it within a digital age. Such a research strategy allows us to address Rowe’s astute observation that the speed of change in media and culture may be masking persistent or recurrent phenomena that indicate that contemporary societies are not as dramatically different from historically preceding societies as they might appear (Rowe, 2009: 122). While looking for evidence of continuities, at the same time, by breaking from the hitherto dominant Anglo-American lens, we will assess tabloid culture globally in order to show important differences when tabloid culture is adopted in varying environments.

Three little piggies went to market

A double-headed pig from a German sixteenth century pamphlet (Conboy, 2002), a wild hog eating a baby in an American supermarket tabloid in the 1990s (Sloan, 2001) and a pushy pig which was briefly the BBC website’s top story in November 2019: each of these stories indicates that the sensational and the bizarre have always and continue to facilitate profit and reader interest for news media. Historically, critics have certainly sufficient evidence to claim that early print culture had its tabloid elements (Reeve, 2014). Publications in question share an attractive layout, they deploy images to good effect, and probe the tastes of the readership for excitement and scandal. We can see such trends well before the emergence of the daily tabloid press in the US in the 1920s and certainly some of the earliest printed publications in Europe combined all of those elements. The explosion of periodicals across seventeenth century Europe provided a combination of woodcut images and often sensational lead stories in keeping with societies in flux as news of religious and political wars, famine, and plague clamoured for the attention of readers. During these upheavals the sensational had every right to assert itself in the everyday.

Indeed, historically, we might see the triumph of the predominantly political, commercial, and respectable newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ bourgeois public sphere as deviations from the trajectory of the proto-tabloid genre. Within this hypothesis, the more sensationalist publications merely adopted other ways of finding their market through broadsides and illustrated ballads hawked by itinerant vendors and supplemented in the nineteenth century by execution sheets and the regular publication of heavily illustrated police gazettes that concentrated on crime. This indicates an even longer trajectory for popular periodicals than the emergence of the penny press in the US in the 1830s and the Sunday press in UK from the 1840s. Of course, the popular market is far from an ideologically neutral location. Curran and Seaton (2003: 106) observed that the tendency had always been for popular newspapers to push towards conservative political views as an incremental consequence of their requirement to fit within the logic of markets and advertising-audience share, despite their claims to represent the voice and interests of the ordinary people. This had been clear from at least the end of the stamp duties in the UK and evidenced in the shift in stance of initially radical Sunday papers like Reynolds’s Weekly News. When these tendencies emerged in the daily press it was through the French daily Le Petit Journal and slightly later the American experiments that led to the competition between newspaper titans of the period, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, in the ‘yellow press’.

Although these tendencies became more consistently marketable and despite a clear flow across the centuries between American and British journalistic cultures (Wiener, 2011; Nicholson, 2016), linear progression or the pernicious influence of American mass culture are difficult to substantiate. For example, the Robinson-Jewitt murder case sensationally reported in Bennett’s New York Herald in 1836 (Crouthamel, 1989) preceded the sensationalization of child prostitution by Stead’s infamous “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette by almost 50 years. The American tabloids of the 1920s with grotesque front pages designed to sell on the street, such as the notorious photograph of Ruth Snyder’s execution by electric chair in 1928, gave rise in very different political circumstances to the conversion of the British Daily Mirror in the 1930s to what we would recognize today as the full tabloid style, and combined this with a left-leaning, commercially successful product.

In I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby (2001), Sloan entertainingly chronicles how ex-Fleet Street tabloid journalists aided and abetted their American colleagues in the creation of the most successful supermarket tabloids. Some estimates claim that 80 per cent of the American supermarket tabloid journalists were British in their heyday (Taylor, 1992: 91).

More than simply reducing the size of the newspaper and far from being terminated by the emergence of new media formats for news and entertainment that some may claim have blunted its functions, the tabloid can, in fact, exist beyond format as a cultural phenomenon. It is to a certain extent content and style, but beyond this it is a matter of flow. This is particularly evident in the contemporary world, where the ability of tabloid culture to permeate media boundaries is becoming more evident (Conboy, 2007). Sometimes format and style can converge, while at other times they are perfectly able to function independent of each other. In Britain, the emergence of the first tabloid-sized newspaper, the Daily Mirror in 1903, certainly did not coincide with the first tabloid culture. Conversely, in the present day, with the decline of mass sales of tabloid newspapers, the culture they have enabled to flourish continues outside the confines of the paper page: sometimes on the web, at other times in more diffuse mediations such as television, celebrity formats, and as we will argue here, in many functions associated with social media as they mesh with journalism (Bingham and Conboy, 2015; Nunn and Biressi, 2008; Seaton, 2017).

Tabloid: analysis and moral panic

In the 1990s a febrile set of discussions emerged about the tabloid as a danger to the body of democratic journalism. These began with critiques of the tabloid newspaper as embodying the polar opposite to serious journalism in its triviality, naked populism, and sensation at all costs. What gave the debate added impetus was the awareness that tabloid values were extending to previously “quality” newspapers. It was a process christened ‘tabloidization’ in the early 1990s. Sparks (2000) provided an analytical survey of what he believed would be lost to public discourse if the values of the tabloid press continued to erode democratic engagement with the public. In the volume he edited with Tulloch is a chapter that provides a longitudinal analysis of how the success and popularity of the tabloids in the UK were shifting content in the quality press with fewer international news stories, more pictures in relation to text, more human interest emphasis, more entertainment-related stories, and fewer political/parliament stories (McLachlan and Golding, 2000).

Bromley had already provided an analysis of this process as more of a two-way flow:

At first the quality press ignored the substantive issues of tabloid news; then decried them. These papers … subsequently began reporting and commenting on the behaviour of the tabloid press, which led to the vicarious reporting of the issues themselves. Finally, the broadsheet papers, too, carried the same news items.

(Bromley, 1998: 31)

The term tabloidization became a mediacentric moral panic in its expression of concern for declining standards of professional behaviour. Esser provided an insight into the economic and legal drivers that shaped this trend within newsrooms in various national contexts. The comparative element of his work enabled him to conclude with confidence that “‘tabloidization’ is an extremely problematic term since it has different meanings in different societies. It can therefore only be analysed with reference to the respective media cultures and journalistic traditions” (Esser, 1999: 318).

This was a perspective that was endorsed in a later study by Uribe and Gunther (2004) who added that the increased presence of home news in tabloids may lead to a preponderance of local taste/generic preference within localized tabloid cultures. Furthermore, they asserted that tabloidization is a dynamic process within varied political and national contexts rather than a static concept. More recently, Lefkowitz has broadened the deba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• 1. Tabloid culture: Parameters and debates
• 2. Digital impacts on the tabloid sphere: Blurring and diffusion of a popular form and its power
• 3. Tabloidization in the Internet age
• 4. Is Facebook driving tabloidization? A cross-channel comparison of two German newspapers
• 5. Tabloids in Zimbabwe: A moral-ethical research agenda
• 6. Trivializing entertainment news in India: Elements of tabloidization in the news coverage of Bollywood celebrities
• 7. Tabloid and populist sensitivities in Denmark
• 8. Recent shifts in the Australian tabloid landscape: Fissures and new formations
• 9. The post-communist “hybrid” tabloid: Between the serious and the “yellow”
• 10. From baby bumps to border walls: Celebrity gossip magazines and the post-truth politic
• 11. Dispatches from la Crónica roja: Why sensationalism and crime still matter in the new Latin America media ecology
• 12. The rise and fall of tabloid journalism in post-Mao China: Ideology, the market, and the new media revolution
• 13. Reclaiming and tabloidizing “truth” in Turkey
• Index