The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011: 'Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor' ed. by Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark W. Turner (review)

Writing books about a single newspaper title offers a time-honored, but potentially old-fashioned, means of addressing the history of the press. Twentieth-century pioneer works such as the multi-authored, official History of the Times (published between 1935 and 1993) and David Ayerst's The Manchester Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (1971) helped lay the foundations for subsequent, more analytical histories of journalism and the press, but were themselves somewhat limited. They tended to offer richly-detailed accounts of the management, editing, and political role of particular newspapers and their staff, while skimming over the deeper, industry-wide forces at work in the press. They were often marked by an insider's fondness for the subject of study, an absorption in chronicling institutional and personal conflicts, and a rather subjective and anecdotal tone. The focus was on narrative and personality.

The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011: 'Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor' adopts a rather different approach to writing the history of a single newspaper. For a start, it is less a biography, and more an obituary: notoriously, in 2011 the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, decided to close the News of the World, following scandalous and catastrophic lapses in journalistic ethics and management. While the paper was relatively healthy (financially at least) at the time of its demise, an obituary for a big national title has substantial contemporary relevance, given the existential challenges faced by the print media today. Older biographies of individual newspapers were written at a time when their subjects—big national papers with large and stable print circulations—seemed to represent the highest stage in a process of historical development, along with nationally based commercial and public-service broadcasters. Newspaper history, thus, tended to chronicle and celebrate the emergence of the big beasts that dominated the twentieth-century media ecology. Those creatures, however, now face mass extinction, or at least a phase of very rapid evolution if they are to survive. It is possible to envisage a media history in which large-circulation national print newspaper titles (and national broadcasters, too) represent but a passing phase, as we return to a confused, fragmented, multi-vocal marketplace for news that (as Andrew Pettegree has recently argued) bears some resemblance to that of the early modern period. In this context, an obituary for a paper like the News of the World might have more than mere documentary significance because it speaks directly to current concerns.

Unlike earlier histories of individual newspapers, the tone of The News of the World and the British Press is scholarly and academic. In a further divergence from the older template of newspaper biography, the authors of the essays in the collection are also generally ambivalent about the paper's contribution and legacy, when they are not lamenting that history outright. This is not a celebratory volume.

The first half of the collection, which will be of most interest to readers of this journal, focuses on the nineteenth century. Here, the historical verdict on the News of the World is perhaps kinder than that found in the second, more contemporary half of the volume. The history of the News of the World can be divided into four main periods. An early phase of creativity and innovation following the paper's founding in 1843 secured a position for the paper as a leader in the marketplace. The News of the World achieved this through its weekly Sunday offering of plentiful news, respectable entertainment, and support for moderate reform, all at an affordable price. The volume encourages us to see the paper in this period as one of a select number of titles, which, in the wake of...