Seminar 1: Tabloid Nation and Lord Northcliffe

The first thing we talked about in the seminar was what we thought of Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). The general opinion was that he was entrepreneurial, with a good head for business but was more politically motivated than journalistically.

He knew the importance of the front page of a newspaper and used this knowledge to good effect. His bold headlines caught the attention of the reader, in this he was very influential. He was very much a risk taker at the start of his career, as shown by the fact that The Daily Mirror was the first paper run by women, for women. He was also the first person to introduce supplements, which he did when he changed the Mirror into a picture paper and created a women’s supplement, so as not to completely lose that readership. However, he was not the original innovator in a lot of his ideas; he was simply bringing Hearst’s ‘yellow journalism’ to the UK.

Northcliffe created a huge newspaper empire, starting with The Illustrated London, The Bicycling News and Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject Under the Sun before moving on to bigger projects like The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Times. After all the build up to the launch of The Daily Mirror, sales quickly dwindled and it became the laughing stock of Fleet Street, an embarrassment to Northcliffe who swiftly brought in Hamilton Fyfe and Hannen Swaffer to turn the publication into a picture paper that would actually sell. This new paper was meant to be entertaining, rather than factual or intellectual. This was reflected in the articles; they were “interesting and sufficiently simple” for the newly educated middle class, with big headlines and lots of pictures so that it could be skimmed rather than read, with a maximum of 250 words per article.

When Northcliffe died, Rothermere inherited the empire and brought about the age of free gifts and prize giveaways, entering it into the craze in newspapers at the time and spending much of the budget on gimmicks such as these.

We next compared Northcliffe and Hearst, with our conclusion being that Northcliffe was much less ruthless; despite the fact that he also needed to seek out and even create news, he would not go to such extreme measures. This could be partly to do with the fact that Hearst would pour as much money as he could into his papers, whereas Northcliffe was much more economically minded, wanting to use his profits to expand into other businesses rather than ploughing the profits straight back into the newspapers. This is especially true when it came to The Daily Mirror; he saw it simply as a means to get more money to put into other businesses, at one point having £8 million worth of secondary business ventures.

We also said that Northcliffe was less afraid of failure, as can be seen by his ‘try it and see’ attitude to launching The Mirror as a woman’s paper. However, he was more motivated by making profit and using his papers for politics than in the journalism side.

We next discussed the quotation on page 23 about the Freedom of the Press. The statement is generally still true today, in that if the advertisers do not like the content, they will not buy advertising and the paper will therefore go bankrupt. However, Rothermere still managed to put some pretty radical content in his papers such as his views on fascism and his support of Hitler and Mussolini. From this, it is clear that as journalists it is important to be objective, but it must not be forgotten that it will be edited and may be rejected from printing; the opinions of the audience and the advertisers are very important.

Photojournalism was an important part of the success of The Mirror. However, it can be dangerous because of the different perceptions and assumptions that can be made of a photograph. Telling a story with a picture leaves out the facts that must be put into words, which can be the essence to understanding the story. However, it is a useful tool because it captures the audience, making them aware of what the headline is in a split second. Also, pictures are important because crime and disasters sell and often the best way to represent stories such as this is through a visual image. Papers are often about appearance, and a wall of print is not enticing.

Newspapers can also be seen as a symbol of status; if you carry around a Guardian or an Observer, people will make the assumption that you are educated, interested in politics and wealthy. Whereas The Mirror or The Sun are seen as lower quality journalism.

We also discussed the fact that journalism thrives on bad things, such as crime, war, disaster, shock statistics and the government gone wrong. These headlines sell papers because we, as readers, love drama.

The last thing that we talked about was how Hearst may have felt about Northcliffe taking his ideas across the pond and poaching members of his staff, such as Kennedy Jones, who was brought over from The New York Journal to be editor of The Daily Mail, or Alexander Kenealy who was also poached from Hearst’s Journal, to replace Hamilton Fyfe as editor of The Daily Mirror. We were curious as to Hearst’s reaction to ‘yellow journalism’ spreading, and after first saying he would have been pretty annoyed at his ideas being stolen, we came to the conclusion that he was quite a self-righteous man and so would probably have been flattered at the popularity of his ideas, and possibly arrogant because he had already done so well and made a huge impact on journalism. This feeling of pride in his work would have been helped by the fact that his papers and Northcliffe’s were not in competition and therefore his sales would not be affected by the spread of his techniques.