ABSTRACT
The 1890s are often seen as a period in which the British newspaper underwent ‘historic change’. The press is described as moving from a situation in which newspapers ‘were limited by their own traditions and the modest demands of their readers to one whose capacity for change was seemingly without end’.2 There was a transformation in the content and layout as well as the economic structure of the newspaper industry3 which is usually associated with one man, Alfred Harmsworth, later ennobled as Lord Northcliffe. His innovations, according to traditional histories of the British press, ‘created a revolution that transformed the nation … perhaps he did more than anyone to create the modern British democracy of the next hundred years – for better or worse’.4 Northcliffe casts a long shadow over the times in which he lived. The archetypal press baron, he exerted total control over his newspapers, issuing a constant stream of instructions to his editors. Amassing an ever greater number of titles, he involved himself in the minutiae of newspaper production, altering layout and design and conducting interviews, usually relating to death and torture, a lifelong obsession of his. Running his newspapers as if they were his personal fiefdom, Northoleon or the Chief, as he was nicknamed, used his papers to promote his political views and messages. His newspapers, the most important of which was the Daily Mail, launched in 1896, intimidated his rivals as well as government ministers. By the beginning of the 1920s Northcliffe and his brother Harold, later Viscount Rothermere, controlled newspapers that had a total circulation of six million – probably the newspaper group with the largest circulation in the world at that time.5 The extent of his press empire and the claims he made
about the power his papers exercised over the public – ‘we can cause the whole country to think with us overnight whenever we say the word’6 – shaped the perception of many of his contemporaries and subsequent historians that he profoundly changed the nature of the British newspaper. While Northcliffe was a dominant figure in the rise of the popular press at
the start of the twentieth century when the newspaper underwent a considerable makeover, it is possible to exaggerate the part he and his fellow newspaper owners played. Many of the innovations associated with Northcliffe and his newspapers had been pioneered and developed by others. Northcliffe imported ideas and practices from the United States, where mass circulation newspapers had started nearly fifty years earlier, and also from the continent, particularly France. His focus on short, sharp and snappy stories and use of headings and sub-headings had been part of the ‘New Journalism’ which entered the daily press from the 1880s onwards. Northcliffe adopted and adapted these techniques to his newspapers, which he positioned to take advantage of the social changes that were taking place around him. The most significant was the emergence of a new reading public brought about by the 1870 Education Act. Northcliffe’s talent was that he was in tune with what these readers wanted and his papers made greater efforts to understand and respond to their readers. He was highly critical of the late Victorian newspaper, which he believed had failed to provide the things that interested the ‘new sort of newspaper reader’,7 and stated that prior to the Mail ‘newspapers dealt with only a few aspects of life’. He complained that ‘highly educated men … have no sense of news … and they are woefully ignorant of anything that has happened since BC 42’.8 Northcliffe’s colleagues believed he had the ability to engage the public at their level of comprehension as he ‘possessed the common mind to an uncommon degree’.9
