Tabloid culture

This chapter introduces the range of contemporary debates on tabloid journalism, including those within this edited book, in order to shed light on the reach and impact of the tabloid. Starting from a model of popular journalism that emanated from countries such as France, the US and Britain in the late nineteenth century that combined convenient format, low price and sensational news values, this profit-driven variant of journalism has spread its influence to most areas of the world. Most research on this phenomenon has concentrated on specific national variants, especially the Anglo-American, but there have been scholarly exceptions to this rule, e.g. Wasserman (2010); Sparks and Tulloch (2000). In fact, it is very much in the spirit of the latter work that this volume seeks to go beyond national borders and influence to consider global developments. An innovative aspect will be to move beyond the consideration of the paper copies of these various national newspapers, to explore first how the tabloids have permeated media culture more generally (Biressi and Nunn, 2009; Bingham and Conboy, 2015), and furthermore to consider how they are adapting to life in an online environment (Bastos, 2016). In assessing how far we have moved towards a global news media environment that has been shaped by tabloid culture, this chapter outlines important questions about the contemporary nature of popular culture, the challenges it faces in the digital era, and perhaps most pertinently the shape of public opinion and its interpretation of a political world dominated by tabloid values.