This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

“Tabloid” is a portmanteau of “tablet” and “alkaloid”. The word was coined in the nineteenth century by a drugs company to market its medicines, but came to mean anything that had been compressed for easy consumption. Alfred Harmsworth, the brilliant journalist who founded the Daily Mail, was the first to apply it to a newspaper, using it describe the 1 January 1901 edition of the New York World, which he had guest-edited at the invitation of its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer. According to this history of the tabloid press, for many “tabloid” has now become shorthand for 

“a kind of journalism that prioritises superficial reporting, scandal and sensation over sober facts; that specialises in gossip and innuendo; that creates and then criticises the cult of celebrity; that somehow glorifies crime, trivia and sleaze and criminalises unorthodoxy”.

But such a view is “clichéd and stereotypical”, writes Terry Kirby, a senior lecturer in journalism at Goldsmiths. At its best, “popular” journalism informs, educates and entertains. It champions the powerless, and holds the powerful to account.

Kirby tells his story with verve and enthusiasm. He takes as his starting point the early seventeenth-century news sheets whose accounts of grisly murders were particularly popular. A 1624 pamphlet headlined “The Crying Murther: Contayning the cruell and most horrible Butchery of Mr Trat” is an excellent example, detailing at length that unfortunate’s bloody demise.

The English Civil War increased demand for “newes”, though even then journalists were not universally loved. In 1648, one writer complained “every Jack-sprat that hath a pen in his inkhorn is ready to gather up the Excrements of the Kingdom”. There was an explosion of titles in the Georgian era before the advent of Sunday newspapers in the early nineteenth century paved the way for the quintessential tabloid, the News of the World.

Launched in 1843, it proclaimed itself “the Cheapest, Largest and Best newspaper” and did indeed carry news of the world — alongside lurid crime stories, accounts of divorce hearings and reports about the arrest of “immoral” women. Sex and violence, in other words.

In America, Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst demonstrated the power of popular journalism with the New York World and San Francisco Examiner respectively. Pulitzer’s paper, aimed at workers, campaigned against injustice and corruption. Hearst, a model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, became so powerful that according to one possibly apocryphal story, he told a photographer who had been unable to find evidence of fighting in the Spanish-American War of 1898: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

Harmsworth, the brains behind several successful titles by his early twenties, was aware of industry developments in the US and, in 1896, launched the Daily Mail. Its front page proclaimed it “THE BUSY MAN’S DAILY JOURNAL”. It wasn’t just for men, though. There was a women’s page — a radical idea — and literary serialisations aimed at female readers. 

It was concise and punchy with eye-catching headlines. “Explain, simplify, clarify,” was the mantra Harmsworth drummed into staff. The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, dismissed the Mail as “a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys”, but readers loved it. By the end of the century, its circulation had risen to around a million.

Harmsworth also launched the Daily Mirror, which was not an immediate hit but soon became successful thanks to its use of photographs, made possible by new technology. In 1908, the Mirror launched a “World’s Most Beautiful Woman Contest”; a portrait of the winner, 18-year-old Ivy Close, made the front page, marking an acceleration of the tabloid love affair with “stunnas’ (though it wasn’t until 1970 that the Sun became the first paper to go “full nipple” with its infamous Page 3).

It was the Daily Express that introduced another innovation: the astrology column. In 1930 the editor had the idea of getting an astrologer to draw up the horoscope of the newly-born Princess Margaret. One Richard Harold Naylor was commissioned and, with the eerie prescience that could only have come from mastery of the occult, foretold her life would be “eventful”.

Long before they actually shrank to tabloid size, both the Express and the Mail changed their design to become dominated by shorter stories, bigger headlines, more emphatic straplines and subheadings. But the tabloid sensibility wasn’t just about visual presentation, it was also about the way stories were written.

Donald Zec, a star Mirror writer, recalled his first assignment as a callow reporter, a fire in Soho. His story began: “Firemen were called to extinguish a blaze.” His news editor read it with incredulity, declared it “shit” and gave it to an old hand who transformed it into “Clad only in her scanties, a blonde, 22-year-old nightclub hostess climbed along a 30 ft parapet in a Soho fire last night to rescue her pet cat Timothy.” According to Zec, “Here, in a single sentence of slick hyperbole, were all the elements of popular journalism — sex, heroism, drama and pet-worship.”

Kirby doesn’t avoid the shameful episodes — the Rothermere titles’ flirtation with fascism, the Sun and Hillsborough and so on — but nor is the book a hatchet job. It is a balanced look at a phenomenon probably now in its twilight years, at least in print form. It is also filled with fascinating detail. For instance, Lord Northcliffe (as Harmsworth became) was a fan of wholemeal bread and once instructed the Mail editor to run a story about its virtues every day of the year. 

In later life, he was mentor to an ambitious young Australian reporter, Keith Murdoch. Murdoch’s son, Rupert, was known as “Red Rupert” at Oxford, where he read PPE and kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms, did work experience at the Express and was almost certainly the only junior sub-editor to return every night to his room at the Savoy. The first issue of the tabloid-sized Murdoch Sun was described by the Morning Star as “more like a paraffin lamp in a brothel than a sun”.

The Newsmongers is at its strongest when covering the ceaseless innovation that characterised tabloids throughout much of the twentieth century. But it runs out of steam a little in the final quarter when it deals with the phone hacking scandal, the consequences of which are still playing out. 

A subsequent scamper through the rise of the internet, Brexit, Megxit and the current state of play in the tabloid world feels almost perfunctory. On the whole, though, Kirby’s book is an entertaining read or, as a tabloid sub might put it, a sensational soaraway success.