The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism by Joel H. Wiener (review)

In 1994 Joel H. Wiener published a short article in Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History titled “The Americanization of the British Press, 1830–1914,” in which he argued that a “revolution” and “transformation” took place in British newspaper journalism in the nineteenth century comprising four innovations—greater speed, more informality, a redefinition of news to include human interest as well as political topics, and the rise of interviewing and investigative reporting (61). All four were historically and culturally American innovations, Wiener argued, introduced in Britain over the protests of conservative cultural elites such as Matthew Arnold.

Wiener’s new monograph of the same title, published more than fifteen years after the original article, has a curious relationship to that namesake piece. If judged by the thesis proposed in Wiener’s new introductory chapter, the book is a related but different project. The introduction describes newspapers by the end of the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States as “joint products of a common culture and indefinably transatlantic in sensibility” and declares his intention to explore British and American journalism comparatively in order to “demonstrate in concrete ways that changes in journalism are long-range, and do not rest exclusively on the innovations of a few key individuals, or … the contributions of a single nation” (4, 5–6). Though he emphasizes that the British popular press of the 1880s and 1890s did deliberately copy American forms, Wiener also seems aware that for the previous fifty years many press innovations developed first or independently in Britain, including illustrated news, crime reporting, and celebrity gossip, and that American journalists in these decades often imitated British practices. The introduction thus seems to replace the simple before-and-after model of the article with a more sophisticated historicism, and its nationalist binarism with greater awareness of the complexities of interacting cultural, economic, and technological systems. If Wiener’s book actually developed that new project it would be a valuable contribution to periodicals scholarship, which needs just such a study. It would also be an odd fit to its own title, since complex innovations unfolding incrementally over decades through a transatlantic feedback loop would not be revolutionary “Americanization” but something else entirely.

As it turns out, however, Wiener’s old title correctly describes his new book, and its nine body chapters remain firmly under the control of the interpretive binaries that drove his original article. Largely eschewing the synthetic analysis proposed in his introduction, Wiener argues throughout the book that eighty-five years of incrementally developing journalistic practice in two different cultures should be understood as a single “revolution” (4) that overthrew a “crabbed” (5), “unimaginative” (1), “staid” (3), and “traditional” (4) press (his descriptions of pre-Victorian newspapers are thick with posterity’s enormous condescension) in favor of newspapers that were “democratic” (231), “spirited and energetic” (3) and “entertaining” (2). The original article’s four categories of innovation are both retained and expanded, yielding an informal, part-thematic, part-chronological arrangement of chapters on sensationalism, democratization, war reporting, the expansion of journalism, gossip and human interest, New Journalism, and the mass popular press of the turn of the century. Throughout the book Wiener repeatedly invokes the terms “revolution” and “transformation” (treated as synonyms) to construct a Whig history in which journalism deservedly grew and thrived as it paid more attention to the interests and empowerment of middle-class and lower-class readers; redefined “news” to include more sports, crime, and sexual scandal; prioritized high-speed newsgathering; and brightened the visual aesthetics of its printed pages. Moreover, Wiener continues to insist that American journalists were the protagonists throughout this almost century-long narrative. Most innovations are presented as American firsts, and when Americans clearly did not develop an innovation first (such as crime news, illustrated journalism, and war reporting) Wiener is ready to...