From “We” to “Me”

In 1886, in “The Future of Journalism”, W. T. Stead expressed the view that it was the “personal touch” in newspapers that would transcend the vapidity of a hypothesized “we”. Nevertheless, it was to be the ability of newspapers, exploiting his own pioneering take on the New Journalism, to articulate a plausible version of a collective voice which was to dominate the journalism of the mass market of the twentieth century. A refinement of the language of this collective articulation of the interests and tastes of a mass readership comes in the popular tabloid newspapers of the period following the Second World War and reaches its most self-consciously vernacular expression in the Sun from the 1980s onwards. However, when comparing the print version of the contemporary Sun with its online version, we might expect to witness a radical departure from traditional notions of the popular predicated on an appeal to a relatively homogenous collective readership and a move to a more atomized, self-assembling notion of the online reader. The “personalized” touch of this form of journalism is very different from that envisaged by Stead but by exploring the ways in which a theme which he considered central to journalism’s mission (its address to an audience) is adapting to an online environment, we may be able to reconsider the changing definition and function of the “popular”. In doing so, it may allow us to reflect upon the implications of a move from “we” to “me” in the articulation of audience in the online version of the Sun.