ABSTRACT
The word “tabloidization” is relatively new, achieving wide currency since the 1980s. The process itself – which has come to be understood as stylistic and content changes that represent a decline in traditional journalistic standards – has been “lamented”1 for a century or more. The problem with the word is that, perhaps like “obscenity,” everyone seems to recognize it when they see it, but no one really agrees what it is. Tabloids and their earlier precursors have long functioned as a convenient demon figure for “real” journalism, which has used them to draw boundaries between good and bad journalistic practices.2
Those boundaries, however, have constantly shifted with changing tastes and media environments. And today, when the environment for journalism has been so radically transformed, my concern is that the still-continuing lament about “tabloidization” may be a distraction from forces that are much more real, a point to which I will return.
