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Pictorial journalism in the latter nineteenth century faced a temporal conundrum: whereas words could travel by telegraph and hence at the speed of electricity, the accompanying illustrations had to travel as material objects and were chronically belated. This article analyzes the strategies with which two prominent Victorian weekly papers—Illustrated London News and Punch—sought to deal with the slowness of illustration and reconcile the speed differentials between textual and visual news with their printing deadlines and production cycles. The most striking of these strategies was to deploy an 'oracular pencil' to work up an illustration before an event had taken place. These pre-produced illustrations relied on specific visual codes that shaped the illustrations' 'truth.' The article shows that, contrary to the self-positioning of pictorial journalists as reporting truthfully and speedily on the world 'out there,' the pictorial press had its own temporal and epistemological laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2009 MPs' expenses scandal was one of the most significant political stories of modern times. It raised questions, not just about the ethics and behaviour of MPs but also about the relationship between politicians at Westminster and the political correspondents who follow them on a daily basis, known as ‘the lobby’. For the significance of this scandal, in media terms, was that the story was not broken by members of the lobby but came from outside the traditional Westminster news gathering process. This paper examines why this was the case and it compares the lobby today with that which was described and analysed by Jeremy Tunstall and Colin Seymour-Ure in their respective studies more than 40 years ago. The article concludes that the lobby missed the story partly because of the nature of the lobby itself and partly as a result of a number of specific changes which have taken place in the media and the political systems over the past 40 years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The career of Kingsley Martin, long-time editor of the journal "New Statesman and Nation," offers a valuable window into leftist perspectives on democracy, citizenship and the press in the inter-war and post-war periods. Besides being one of the most prominent journalists of the 1930s-1950s, he deserves particular attention for articulating a wide-ranging critical and historical understanding of the press. This paper focuses on Martin's understanding of the press as a window into the prehistory of contemporary media studies. There is considerable irony that a journalist so frequently one-sided as Martin would demand truthful reporting. In the British context, Martin could plausibly defend his socialist politics as flowing from a commitment to "truth." More to the point, though, he was known for his imperious behavior, for instance, in refusing for seemingly partisan reasons to publish George Orwell's now legendary reports from the Spanish Civil War. Yet whatever his professional and personal limitations, his own journalistic writings display a rhetorical commitment to the same rationalistic model developed in his meta-journalistic writings.