ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Dallas’s main claims regarding the audience for magazines and newspapers. These are: that subscribing to a journal should be understood not as the passive consumption of a print commodity but as a mode of voluntary combination or public association; and that periodical literature functions dialectically since it is not only an articulation of public opinion, but also acts as a communicative force shaping individual ideas. Beginning from a clarification of the distinction between ‘class’ and ‘mass’ periodicals, and supported by quantitative as well as qualitative evidence, the discussion will cover the conflicting concepts of readers as active citizens and as passive consumers. Here, the argument returns to the influence of the ‘New Journalism’, focusing on its reformulation of readership. This development should be understood as representing a particular symptom of the growing dominance of commercial interests in the press as an industry and a concomitant diminution of its role in the healthy formation of public opinion.
