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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]

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]

Reporting on crime and the courts are among the classic functions of journalism. In the UK, journalists and others must abide by the Contempt of Court Act 1981, the main piece of primary legislation aimed at ensuring coverage of legal matters is fair to the participants. The restrictions are generally tighter in practice than in jurisdictions such as the US, where the media has a much freer hand to engage in pre-trial reporting. This paper argues that media coverage of the arrest of the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper' serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, in 1981 while Parliament was considering the question of contempt, has made the UK regime tougher than it might otherwise have been. Excessive reporting was influenced by an unusually celebratory police news conference. This news coverage coloured the contemporary debate around contempt, and any opportunity for a more relaxed approach to contempt in the UK's jurisdictions was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of a local newspaper in shaping a community's collective memory of child sexual abuse by documenting changing representations of a former rural orphanage and its custodians where such horrific crimes took place. The paper conducts an across-time analysis of news coverage (1944–1954 and 2010–2020) to map these changing representations in their media, policy and social contexts. It extends scholarship around collective memory and temporal reflexivity as a provocation for journalists to acknowledge and engage with their news outlet's own mediated past (no matter how uncomfortable) when reporting on and interpreting events such as Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the information that was disseminated in the Netherlands and Spain—and other territories connected to the latter such as Portugal and Flanders under Habsburg rule—about the taking by the Dutch of the city of San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, and his subsequent recovery by a Spanish-Portuguese expedition (1624–1625). Despite the different communicative structures, these national journalisms shared professional strategies to inform about the conflicts that occurred in the distant Brazilian lands. Given the difficulty of informing promptly and truthfully, the discourse of the Dutch and Spanish newspapers about their colonies alternates between the information explosion and silence, depending on the alternation between victories and defeats in American territory. News was as connected as were the empires that controlled vast territories in Europe and America, despite the ideological and religious differences of the era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this paper refers to both the personality and work of the Spaniards who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had to abandon their homeland fleeing from the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833), and the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in the New World, the forerunners of the struggles for independence in their respective countries. Both ended up settling in London, a city that served not only as a refuge but also as a place from which to disseminate their slogans in favour of freedom. Three areas are discussed: the publications of liberal Spanish exiles in London in the early nineteenth century, the interaction between Spanish and (Latin) American exiles and the role of women in this endeavour and in the cause of liberalism in general. The London press shaped this exile journalism and the subsequent liberal journalism in Spain when the extreme censorship from which these exiled journalists had fled was finally lifted. We believe that this global approach offers an original perspective from which to highlight the role of women, with a view to filling the traditional historiographical lacuna in this regard. To this end, we have employed recent relevant literature and primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1976 David Murphy wrote his critique of the role of the UK regional press in local politics—The Silent Watchdog: The Press in Local Politics. Through the next two decades, local 'papers of record' attempted to report on the activities and decisions of their local councils regularly and diligently but the decline of the regional press in the twenty-first century has rendered Murphy's critique obsolete. This article will look at what was expected of local journalism in the 1970s. It will show what was delivered until the twenty-first century and then look at how local press coverage of local government has declined, raising the scenario of a 'local democratic deficit'1 whereby local politics in some communities receives little direct coverage, creating a danger of a disconnect between local government and local communities caused by the abandonment of its former role by the regional press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon secret correspondence between the British colonial government in Hong Kong and the Foreign Office in London, Hong Kong newspapers and individual memoirs, this paper examines how the British colonial government enabled CCP propaganda that shaped the formation of the early news policies of the newly founded PRC. Challenging the conclusions of previous scholarship, this study argues that while Hong Kong was the centre of political debates regarding whether privately-owned newspapers could exist in the PRC, Communist Party leaders in Hong Kong reached an internal consensus regarding press reform well before the New Democracy Revolution was aborted. Furthermore, the democrats and private newspapers runners, who were the intended objects of transformation, contributed to the process of the demise of private newspapers without requiring recourse to violent-means on the part of the Communists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how British newspapers in the 1930s created a particular frame or view of radio as an international medium. This frame was created around the idea of a duality, of radio being defined by both national and foreign broadcasts. By analysing coverage provided by the main national newspapers at this time, in relation to their specific radio coverage, such as programme listing and highlights, this paper delineates the form the frame took, what was included and was absent. Such a frame provides an understanding of how the newspapers viewed and valued radio in a period when international broadcasts were seen as an important part of what radio could offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 argues for the relevance of the media history of the press. Using a broad and open media concept, this perspective should be understood as the study of the construction and communication of the self-images and ideology of the press. Rather than describing the complex of problems as images that are 'spread' through one channel (newspapers) by one actor (the press), it should be seen as a mutual exchange between various media and various actors. Different audiences have been resources for the press, just as the press has been a resource for them. Instead of separating proper journalism, the spreading of the self-image, and the reception of different audiences as clearly defined areas, they must be seen as constituting each other. Focusing on the funeral of Swedish editor Lars Hierta, the paper argues for the methodological advantages inherent in the media event and the surrounding cultural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2002 the 'Daily Mirror' re-launched itself as an apparently more serious newspaper. The paper's editor, Piers Morgan evoked the memory of the Daily Mirror of the 1950s and 60s in his high-minded ambition of preaching more serious journalism to his readers. Morgan's embrace of the Mirror's heritage and the praise the post-September 11th paper attracted for returning to the paper's old campaigning roots offered a new twist to a well-documented story.

In its centenary year the British tabloid periodical, the 'Daily Mirror,' is going through a significant transformation, the most obvious sign of which is the effort to realign itself in the British newspaper market. Editor Piers Morgan argued the re-launch was not about going up market but about becoming a serious paper with serious news, serious sport, serious gossip and serious entertainment. The 'Daily Mirror' has been at the forefront of the development of popular newspaper journalism since its launch in 1903 as the 'First Daily Paper for Gentlewomen.' The late 1940s, 50s and 60s were the heyday of the paper.

Between General Franco's agony (October/November 1975) and the constitution's approval (December 1978), European media reported intensively about the democratisation process in Spain. The present paper deals with its examination through the Radio della Svizzera di lingua italiana broadcasts. As the only Swiss Italian-speaking broadcaster, it tried to provide in-depth information and opinion on a country whose solid ties with Switzerland were based on economy, migration and tourism. The study of this non-commercial radio allows us to determine the way the democratisation was approached and portrayed for a Swiss audience and offers a genuine case for transnational historical research. [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]

Recent contributions to knowledge about early journalism developed in different parts of Europe-Italy, France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain ... -have made it possible to trace a fairly precise map for the historical origin of this phenomenon. However, the scope of work carried out with a view to developing frameworks of interpretation to explain the reasons for this appearance is not as far-reaching. This paper reviews the recurring theoretical models found to date in the specific bibliography and proposes a new framework of interpretation, capable of encompassing the complexity and pan-European nature of early journalism in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the manner in which the newspaper "Votes for Women" evolved to challenge and compete with the press prior to 1912, within a discussion of the Women's Social and Political Union's (WSPU) wider press strategy. The populist style may simply have been considered the most appropriate means of conveying news of the militant campaign's sensational activities; new methods of protest necessitating new means of communication. However, viewed within the wider context of the WSPU's activities, the paper's populism should be considered a deliberate part of an organizational press strategy. The attempts to attract, and subsequently influence and critique, news coverage indicated the Union's press-aware outlook. With this cognizance sharpened by intensifying press hostility to militancy, Votes for Women's populist format, together with its efforts for mass-circulation, signaled an effort to confront apparent press prejudice by marketing an alternative source of suffrage news to a large audience.

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.