ABSTRACT
The tabloid newspaper became an established feature of the British press in the 1970s. Most of Fleet Street’s best-selling newspapers went tabloid, incorporating changes in the size, values and production methods associated with ‘tabloidisation’ which many associate with the ‘dumbing down’ of the British press. In the process the industry vacated Fleet Street en masse, relocating to other parts of London, primarily Wapping. The event that led to the move was the sale of the Sun newspaper to Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch in November 1969. Within a relatively short period of time the Sun became Britain’s best-selling newspaper, overtaking the Mirror in circulation terms in 1978. The newspaper dominated the market for the next twenty years. It achieved this by pushing the newspaper’s content relentlessly downmarket and by a combination of brilliant marketing and innovative layout. It was assisted by several other factors: changes in the ownership of its major competitors which made them less responsive to the market; the economic problems of the 1970s, which had a profound impact on the newspaper business and social changes which emphasised individualism and selfinterest. The capacity of the Sun to tune into the changes in British society that brought Margaret Thatcher to power was significant to its success. The increased competition the Sun brought to Fleet Street in the 1980s
intensified the pace of change in the popular and mid-market newspapers. The Daily Mail went tabloid in 1971, followed by the Express in 1977. The Daily Star was launched by the Express Group from its Manchester office to compete with the Sun in 1978 and by the beginning of the 1980s Britain had five tabloid newspapers pursuing a circulation war more savage than anything that had gone before. Promotions, gimmicks and gifts made their return when the Star introduced ‘bingo’ with major cash giveaways to lure
more readers. Huge amounts were spent on television advertising, particularly by the Sun, which targeted slots on Sunday night to tell its readers what was coming up in the following week.2 Murdoch even bought a large stake in the ITV company London Weekend Television to sustain this operation. The Sun’s formula for tabloidisation set the agenda for Fleet Street as a whole – and broadsheet newspapers were not averse to publishing ‘a species of nonsense and trivia which in better times a gentleman would have only discerned by rummaging through the drawers of a valet’.3 Broadsheets did not adopt the tabloid size until later – but it can be argued that tabloid values started to permeate these papers in the 1980s. Other media such as radio and television were also seen as ‘dumbing down’ their content as the influence of the ‘soaraway Sun’ stretched beyond the boundaries of the newspaper business. The tabloid revolution coincided with the ‘end of the Street’. In 1986 a
dispute with the trade unions was the excuse Murdoch was looking for to move his newspapers – which now included The Times and Sunday Times, which he had acquired five years earlier – from Fleet Street to Wapping. The opportunity for Murdoch to select the time and place of his final battle with the print unions was made possible by the rapid pace of change in print technology. The new technology facilitated a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the newspaper industry – between management and unions, editors and owners, journalists and news desks. Several new newspapers were launched in the midst of the new climate created post-Wapping – including Today, the Post, the Sunday Correspondent, News on Sunday, the Independent and the Daily Sport. Some came and went very quickly. Others stayed. All attested to the volatility in the national newspaper market in the 1980s when most of the major newspaper titles changed hands. The British newspaper was increasingly integrated into the world of big business. Many of the new owners were large conglomerates better known for producing other kinds of products. The subsidiary role of newspapers was seen by many editors as a handicap; owners were criticised for showing little interest in their newspapers, their inability to act swiftly or decisively in a highly competitive environment and their lack of comprehension of what was required to run a successful newspaper. The return of more interventionist proprietors around and after the Wapping episode – men such as Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black – was welcomed by some in the industry. There were several newspaper editors who believed strong management would make the decisions that would help to compete more effectively with the Murdoch press, which by 1986 dominated the national newspaper scene. This did not happen. News was further marginalized in the columns of British newspapers. The
success of the Sun was based on soft news such as sport, celebrities and royal stories, which increasingly found their way into the columns of popular and broadsheet newspapers. Travel, lifestyle as well as a variety of other forms of entertainment-related copy burgeoned. The cult of personality swamped the pages of the press as celebrities of all shapes, sizes and status had their lives
exposed through the lens of the paparazzi and the pens of the gossip columnists. The growth of space created by more newspapers and more pages was more easily filled by features than news stories. A drop occurred in the proportion of general news carried by newspapers. Politics continued to recede as a newsworthy topic but serious news of all kinds suffered. The most fundamental change in the industry took place in the provincial
newspaper market. Provincial newspapers started to decline again following a fairly prosperous decade in the 1970s when their share of advertising increased considerably. The relatively buoyant advertising masked the steady drop in the number of people reading local papers. In 1970 42 per cent of adults read an evening provincial paper, compared to 32 per cent in 1981/2.4
In the 1980s provincial papers underwent what has been dramatically described as a ‘meltdown’ as advertising and sales plummeted. Robust competition came from changes in the regulation of local radio and the advent of a new kind of newspaper – the ‘free sheet’. This newspaper represented the logical development of a press financed primarily by advertising – it was distributed free of charge. Their growth was ‘breath taking’, mushrooming from 185 titles in 1975 to nearly 900 in 1986,5 and at the expense of provincial titles – with the exception of Sunday papers, whose numbers and circulation increased in the provinces and nations of Britain.
