History of British newspapers
Mass education and increasing affluence led to new papers such as the Daily Mail emerging at the end of the 19th century, aimed at lower middle-class readers.
[2] In the early 2010s many British newspapers were implicated in a major phone hacking scandal which led to the closure of the News of the World after 168 years of publication and the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.
Johann Carolus' Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, published in Strassburg in 1605, is usually regarded as the first news periodical.
Swift had control of the journal for 33 issues between November 1710 and June 1711, but once he became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he gave up regular journalistic work.
Later, toward the middle of the same century, the provisions and the penalties of the Stamp Act were made more stringent, yet the number of newspapers continued to rise.
This was the most significant newspaper of the first half of the 19th century, but from around 1860 there were a number of more strongly competitive titles, each differentiated by its political biases and interests.
It was chiefly Milner Gibson and Richard Cobden who advocated the case in parliament to first reduce in 1836 and, in 1855, totally repeal the tax on newspapers.
The Chartist Northern Star, first published on 26 May 1838, was a pioneer of popular journalism but was very closely linked to the fortunes of the movement and was out of business by 1852.
Mason Jackson, its art editor for thirty years, published in 1885 The Pictorial Press, a history of illustrated newspapers.
[20] From 1860 until around 1910 is considered a 'golden age' of newspaper publication, with technical advances in printing and communication combined with a professionalisation of journalism and the prominence of new owners.
The availability of repeated advertising permitted manufacturers to develop nationally known brand names that had a much stronger appeal than generic products.
[31] Sales in the millions depended on popular stories, with a strong human interesting theme, as well as detailed sports reports with the latest scores.
James Curran and Jean Seaton report: The Times was long the most influential prestige newspaper, although far from having the largest circulation.
Its editor Geoffrey Dawson was closely allied with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and pushed hard for the Munich Agreement in 1938.
Candid news reports by Norman Ebbutt from Berlin that warned of warmongering were rewritten in London to support the appeasement policy.
[34][35] Most of the "press barons" who owned and closely supervised major newspapers were empire builders focused on making money and extending their audience.
[42] A 1938 Report on the British Press (from the think tank Political and Economic Planning) expressed concerns that "a dangerous tendency has recently been manifesting itself by which entertainment ceases to be ancillary to news and either supersedes it or absorbs it; many people welcome a newspaper that under the guise of presenting news, enables them to escape from the grimness of actual events and the effort of thought by opening the backdoor of triviality and sex appeal.
In response to a threat of statutory regulation, the voluntary General Council of the Press was formed in 1953, funded by newspaper proprietors.
When he relaunched the flagging Sun newspaper in tabloid format on 17 November 1969, Rupert Murdoch began publishing photographs of clothed glamour models on its third page.
On 17 November 1970, editor Larry Lamb celebrated the tabloid's first anniversary by publishing a photograph of a model in the nude sitting in a field with one of her breasts visible from the side.
The Wapping dispute was a significant turning point in the history of the trade union movement and of UK industrial relations.
Despite the widespread use of the offset litho printing process elsewhere, the Murdoch papers in common with the rest of Fleet Street continued to be produced by the hot-metal and labour-intensive Linotype method, rather than being composed electronically.
It pioneered computer photosetting and full-colour offset printing at a time when national newspapers were still using Linotype machines and letterpress.
By 1988, nearly all the national newspapers had abandoned Fleet Street to relocate in the Docklands, and had begun to change their printing practices to those being employed by News International.
The paper was created at a time of fundamental change and attracted staff from the two Murdoch broadsheets who had chosen not to move to the new headquarters in Wapping.
The Barclay brothers bought the newspaper in 1992, investing an estimated $110 million and in 1996 transforming it into a high-end tabloid format oriented at the business community edited by Andrew Neil.
The satirical magazine Private Eye lampooned him as "Cap'n Bob" and the "bouncing Czech", the latter nickname having originally been devised by Prime Minister Harold Wilson (under whom Maxwell was an MP).
Maxwell's untimely death triggered a flood of instability with banks frantically calling in their massive loans, and his publishing empire collapsed.
Employees of the newspaper were convicted of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories.
The Inquiry published the Leveson Report in November 2012, which reviewed the general culture and ethics of the British media, and made recommendations for a new, The independent, body to replace the existing Press Complaints Commission, which would be recognised by the state through new laws.
