Search

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, theDaily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, theDaily Workerwas very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the extensive ‘reader competitions’ run in popular magazines and story papers of the early twentieth century. Using examples from Irish story papers, it examines the appeal of these competitions to both the publishers and the readers. For readers, competitions offered an opportunity to display skills which combined the results of universal education with the more playful knowledge that was part of popular parlour games and other leisure activities of the time. They also offered readers an opportunity to ‘write back’ to the mass media, with indications of an extremely high level of interactivity between readers and editors, including reader suggestions for competition ideas, and disputes regarding the rules and judging of contests. The article goes on to argue that these competitions were themselves significant examples of mass media structures of the time, relying as they did on the specific forms of print culture and upon mechanisms of industrial time and communication processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the war correspondents traveling in the Balkans during the period of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) to cover military campaigns. It tries to explore the paths of information, the mechanisms of propaganda and the restrictions used by the Balkan states to control the content of the news transmitted. The Balkan Wars were among the first military events covered so extensively by newspapers all around the world. In the battle-fields the principles of the new field of journalism were highly tested. The lessons learnt in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars proved to be productive and useful for the improvement of the relationship between war correspondents and military authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectivity has been regarded as a central ideal of American journalism in the early twentieth century. The concurrent emergence of photography in the press is rarely associated with this development. The article explores the photographic legacy of journalistic objectivity by discussing a crucial phase in the development of reproduction media for images, the transition from wood engravings to halftones. The former was the dominant mode of ‘illustrated journalism’, the latter became the dominant mode of reproducing photojournalism in print in the twentieth century. The halftone process introduced an equivalence between photographs and their reproductions, obliterating the mediation that had taken place in a code of reproduction that was almost imperceptible. In the contested adoption of the halftone process, it is argued, a shifting valuation of photographs can be observed that prefigures the formulation of objectivity as a transparent code of mediation in journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]