As “A Penny Paper for One Halfpenny” the Daily Mail was sold to the reader at a low price only made possible by the paper’s lucrative revenue from advertising. It was the first British paper to be based deliberately on advertising revenue rather than on sales revenue and the first to publish circulation figures audited independently by a chartered accountant. These figures gave advertisers evidence that the Daily Mail was reaching the public in sufficient numbers to warrant increasingly expensive advertising space. Another Mail slogan, “The Busy Man’s Daily Journal,” emphasized the snappy editorial style that followed the Harmsworth dictum of “Explain, simplify, clarify.” This approach guided the new type of journalists known as subeditors, whose job was to rewrite stories in the “house” style, to compose headlines, and, if necessary, to add a little seasoning to the original story.
Another Harmsworth innovation was the tabloid newspaper, which was to revolutionize the popular press in the 20th century. The term tabloid was coined by Harmsworth when he designed and edited an experimental issue of the New York World, produced for New Year’s Day, 1900. The tabloid halved the size of the newspaper page, which allowed easier handling by the reader, but it also suited the new, curtailed size of articles and the more numerous pages required per issue. In the long run, however, the term tabloid has come to define the popular newspaper more in style than in physical characteristics. The first successful tabloid was Harmsworth’s Daily Mirror (1903). Originally launched as a newspaper for “gentlewomen,” the Mirror had been a failure, but the tabloid format, together with a halfpenny cover price and numerous photographs, made the new picture paper an immediate success, with circulation running at more than one million copies by 1914. Lord Northcliffe sold the Mirror to his brother Lord Rothermere in 1913. Meanwhile, the equally successful tabloid Daily Sketch had been begun in Manchester in 1909 by Sir Edward Hulton.
Like the American press barons, Northcliffe constantly intervened in the production of his newspapers, sending orders under his preferred appellation of “Chief” to the editors not only of the Mail and the Mirror but also of The Times (from 1908) and the Observer (from 1905), both of which he owned until his death in 1922. His control over newspaper content was never more apparent than during World War I, when the British Official Press Bureau was set up to control the amount of war information available to the public through the newspapers. Though accepting that a certain degree of censorship was necessary to conceal military intelligence from the enemy, Northcliffe nevertheless boldly defied the bureau over its cover-up of an ammunition shortage. Such defiance confirmed the independence of the press from government, but the influence of proprietors was itself to become an important issue in press freedom. This was typified after World War I by the intensive campaign for Empire Free Trade in Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. The preservation of the British Empire was the guiding passion of Max Aitken, who had been raised to the peerage as Lord Beaverbrook in 1917. A Canadian-born journalist who took the Express into second place in national circulation behind the Daily Mirror, Beaverbrook continued to thrust his viewpoint on the editors of his papers for many years, although his campaigns for free trade within the empire and, after World War II, commonwealth trade preference were unsuccessful. Through the Daily Express, the Sunday Express (started in 1918), and the London Evening Standard (acquired 1923), Beaverbrook’s opposition to Britain’s attempts to join the European Economic Community (EEC; later the European Community, which became the primary component of the European Union), was given a regular airing. Beaverbrook admitted to the first Royal Commission on the Press that if an editor took a divergent view on, for example, the empire, he would be “talked out of it.” So talented was Beaverbrook as a publisher and journalist that the Express newspapers gained and kept many readers for life, even though it is doubtful whether the issues of empire and EEC membership were of passionate concern to them.
The circulation “war of the tabs” that broke out in New York City in the 1920s was copied in Britain in the 1930s, bringing with it numerous circulation-boosting stunts. Prizes for readers had been introduced as early as the 1890s, when Harmsworth offered a pound sterling per week for life for the reader who could guess the value of gold in the Bank of England on a given day. In the 1920s one paper offered free insurance to subscribers, but this soon proved too costly to maintain. In 1930 the Daily Herald offered gifts to woo new readers. Although they were condemned by the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association (later known as the Newspaper Publishers Association), gift schemes proliferated among other newspapers, with the Herald eventually achieving a circulation of two million, the highest in the world. Many of the new readers were stolen from other papers—the Daily Mirror saw its figure drop from more than one million to 700,000 by 1934—but newspapers in general acquired 1.5 million new readers, so that by the end of the decade there was a national newspaper aimed at every socioeconomic class. The Daily Mirror was revived by its editor, Harry Bartholomew, to become a true working-class paper with a radical political voice, although the winning of new readers—circulation eventually topped four million—was mostly due to the shameless use of the techniques of yellow journalism. The modern era
After World War II, radical changes in newspaper production in particular and mass communication in general occurred on a par with those brought by the Industrial Revolution. Electronic and communications technology have continued to revolutionize the ways in which newspapers are written, edited, and printed, while radio, television, and the Internet have developed into serious competitors as sources of news, official information, and entertainment—and as vehicles for advertising. Technological developments
Computers and telecommunications transformed the production process for the modern newspaper. They also led to changes in the quality of the newspaper itself, but their real impact was on the finances of the newspaper industry and on the relevance of the traditional print workers. One of the first signs of technology’s potential for change came in the 1930s, when Walter Morey developed the Teletypesetter (first demonstrated in 1928). This machine was an improvement on the telegraph, which was widely used by reporters in the field and by the wire services, such as Reuters and Associated Press, to send news items in draft form to editorial offices miles away. With the Teletypesetter, the impulses sent over the wire included encoded instructions to Linotype machines. The machines could then decode the instructions and automatically prepare whole pages ready for printing. It was therefore envisaged that the reporter would have the facility for “direct input” into the printing room, which would eliminate the need for retyping by a Linotype operator and thus save newspapers both time and money.