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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]

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.

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 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]

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]

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]

Journalism history, like media history, is an impressively interdisciplinary field in which historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and communication scholars regularly engage each other's work. Yet journalism is also rare in the extent to which practitioners have written far-ranging histories of their own profession. Examining five well-known histories written by journalists practicing in Britain—Francis Williams, Phillip Knightley, Hugh Cudlipp, Matthew Engel, and Andrew Marr—it argues that even if their methodologies differ from those of academics, their contributions should be taken seriously both as secondary literature and as primary sources for our understanding of the changing culture of journalism in modern Britain. In particular, they give us insight into journalists’ ongoing attempts to define their own profession and genre against the backdrop of journalism's ever-changing material context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one by Codell and Kaul that examine the role of the British press, one by Wills that explores the relationship between the Irish press and political culture and one by Shoesmith and Long that examines the newspaper "Dawn."

This article considers the representation of tabloid journalists in 1930s British cinema. It argues that during this period, British films showed journalists to be collaborating with state powers to maintain a stable society. They also depicted reporters as not adhering to any recognised ethical framework. As a result, cinematic journalists in 1930s Britain differ markedly from later, better-known fictional reporters, as they do not challenge inequalities or uphold principles of ethics. The 1930s saw the consolidation and expansion of the popular press in Britain, as well as a boom in cinemagoing. The depiction of the relatively novel 'type' of the tabloid reporter in fiction films in this period therefore had the potential to greatly impact the public's view of the journalism profession. The article highlights how this under-researched period in British film history gives important indications of the place of the reporter in the country's popular imagination, in this decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the British Government sought to recruit the BBC in its propaganda activities concerning the Spanish Civil War and in particular to ‘quieten’ domestic public opinion about the conflict. It also considers the extent to which the Corporation acceded to government demands and concludes that, despite areas of cooperation and even complicity, there were also putative signs of editorial innovation and independence in the BBC's news service. In the disquiet this created in official circles, the Spanish Civil War presaged many future conflicts between public broadcasters and governments about the coverage of international crises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues for the importance of work in print and newspaper history written before the 1960s. That decade is seen as marking a break in the way the topic was approached with work prior to the 1960s being criticised for narrowness and theoretical weaknesses. The article points to the sophistication of research and writing prior to 1960, in popular and more scholarly focused work. It argues that the historiography of this topic should be understood in terms of longer processes of development and institutional constraints which correlate with similar developments in other areas of historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article builds on recent work on seventeenth-century journalism by arguing that newsbooks rapidly became an interactive medium. This emerges from recent studies of censorship and official monitoring of the press, in terms of interference by licensers, but it can be developed much further by demonstrating how different kinds of readers exerted control over what was printed. This was not only just a matter of commercial advertising, but also of book reviews and readers' letters, as well as of editors being ‘desired’, ‘instructed’ and ‘appointed’ to insert notices and news stories. This was done not only merely by members of the political elite, but also by readers from across the country and across the social spectrum, not least as part of political campaigning and lobbying. As such, new light is shed upon the processes involved in journalism, and upon the importance which contemporaries placed upon the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will examine the involvement of the Empire Press Union, including prominent early members like Lord Northcliffe and its founder Sir Harry Brittain, in the development of imperial air services as part of a larger ongoing study involving India, Australia and New Zealand. The main focus will be on the first three decades of the organization (1909-39) and on its regular conference activity which correspond with the pioneering period of aviation in Britain and in the antipodes. The press, as will be shown, had a commercial stake in the pioneer aviation story, while the Empire Press Union, for reasons to be outlined below, had a strong interest in Imperial Airways' plans to develop the 'longest air route in the world' to that time. The focus of this analysis is inevitably limited: it does not, for example, deal with the ambitious British airship experiment which competed for funds and publicity with aviation, albeit with tragic outcomes. In contrast with the triumphalism of traditional communication and press narratives, it uncovers a complex faltering set of developments in which the Empire Press Union, both for altruistic and self-interested motives, played its part. In general terms, this involvement also serves to confirm that the Empire Press Union and its elaborate conferences paid increasing attention to new and emerging technologies like aviation and broadcasting in the interwar years. Moreover, this interest was not solely a response to the commercial challenges which such inventions posed to newspapers and print journalism; rather it reflected the willingness of the Press Union leadership, both in Britain and elsewhere, to harness such developments in the interests of speedier and cheaper imperial communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]