Today’s Objectives 1 To understand the birth of the New Journalism

1. Today’s Objectives 1 To understand the birth of the New Journalism 2 The parts played by W T Stead and Alfred Harmsworth 3 Why New Journalism was controversial • Profit versus education • Analysis versus cheerleading • Liberalism betrayed? 4 The commercial value of hard news

2. “Men of great ability and high character (who) gave their best to what they conceived to be a public service without seeking recognition or reward beyond a very moderate emolument for their labour.” J A Spender, Mid Victorian Journalist

3. Pall Mall Gazette31 January 1900

4. “…it may be thought indeed that in some newspaper enterprise of the present day there is too much, rather than too little of the prosaic commercial sprit. The community suffers…when a paper is worked for money-making purposes alone, like a shop or a factory or a patent medicine.” Fox Bourne Liberal Journalist and Politician

5. “We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a clever and energetic man has lately invented. It has much to recommend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault that it is feather brained.It throws out assertions at a venture because it wishes them true; does not correct either them or itself, if they are false; and to get at the state of things as they really are seems to feel no concern whatever.” Matthew Arnold, Poet and Cultural Critic

6. Father of the New Journalism? Believed in the press as “…the greatest agency for influencing public opinion in the world" and "the true and only lever by which thrones and governments could be shaken and the masses of the people raised.”

10. “Yesterday morning, J. Dennett, the miserable and decrepit old man, who was convicted on Friday of the wilful murder of Jane Rogers, was executed…He seemed much agitated when he came upon the scaffold: and continued to tremble violently until he was turned off, when his hands clasped together and he seemed to die without the least struggle. After hanging the usual time, his body was delivered over to the surgeons for dissection.”

12. “We believe that the reader of the daily journal longs for more than mere politics; and we shall present him with plenty of entirely unpolitical literature – sometimes humorous, sometimes pathetic; anecdotal, statistical, the craze for fashions and the arts of housekeeping and now and then, a short, dramatic and picturesque tale. In our reporting columns we shall do away with the hackneyed style of obsolete journalism; and the men and women that figure in the forum or the pulpit or the law court shall be presented as they are – living, breathing, in blushes or in tears – and not merely by the dead words that they utter. Our ideal is to leave no event unrecorded; to be earliest in the field with every item of news; to be thorough and unmistakable in our meaning; to be animated, readable and stirring.” T P O’Connor, Editor and Proprietor The Star in the first edition published 17th January 1888

13. Alfred Harmsworth1865 - 1922

15. “…the note of the Daily Mail is not so much economy of price as concise and compactness. It is essentially the busy man’s paper. It is no secret that remarkable new inventions have just come to the help of the press. Our type is set by machinery, we can produce 20,000 copies per hour, cut, folded and, if necessary, with the pages pasted together! Our stereotyping arrangements, engines and machines are of the latest English and American construction, and it is the use of these inventions on a scale unprecedented in any English newspaper office that enables the Daily Mail to effect a saving of from 30 to 50 percent, and be sold at half the price of its contemporaries.”

16. “You could search the Victorian papers in vain for any reference to changing fashions, for instance. You could not find in them anything that would help you to understand the personalities of public men. We cannot get from them a clear and complete picture of the times in which they were published, as one could from the Daily Mail. Before that was published, journalism dealt only with a few aspects of life. What we did was to extend its purview to life as a whole.” Lord Northcliffe (formerly Alfred Harmsworth)

17. “It reported the news – wars (an important selling point) the Empire, politics, crime, accidents, sport. But it was also full of chat and gossip, regaling readers with trivia about the great and famous, and thereby creating a spurious sense of knowingness and intimacy. A story in the first issue about ‘our cycling MPs’ gave a nudge that, in the saddle, ‘public men’ were plain folks like the rest of us. One headline ‘VERY ORDINARY PEOPLE OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR ROYALTY’ took this idea to the extreme. Not only were royalty ordinary human beings: they were literally indistinguishable from the rest of us. In every Daily Mail reader lurked a prince or princess.” Professor Colin Seymour-Ure

18. “I am but a comparatively young journalist, but I have seen Cabinets upset, Ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, Bills transformed, estimates remodelled, programmes modified, Acts passed, generals nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither , war proclaimed and war averted, by the agency of newspapers.” W T Stead

19. “The appearance of Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail in 1896 coincided with the high point of nineteenth-century imperialism. In the last thirty years of the century the British Empire increased enormously in size, covering by 1900 one fifth of the world’s land surface. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations provoked Beatrice Webb to note in her diary in June 1897: ‘Imperialism in the air – all classes drunk with sight-seeing and hysterical loyalty.” Dr Chandrika Kaul

20. Three Dedicated Imperialists Strachey of the Spectator Scott of the Guardian Garvin of the Observer

21. One of the most thrilling scenes in this story of human suffering and destruction was when a bootmaker named Moore, aged twenty-nine, was seen to appear at front window of the second floor, with his clothes all alight. The room was at the time one dense mass of flame, and escape was impossible. In the fierce light spectators plainly perceived the awful look of despair written on the poor fellow’s face. Only one moment did he stand at the window, and then he threw himself into the street below. A sickening feeling passed through the crowd when it was seen that Moore had miscalculated his distance, and that his body was literally impaled on the metal spear-heads of the railings in front of the house. He was heard to murmur, I tried to save them and then I jumped.” Daily Mail News Report from 1896

22. Crime Sells Newspapers “The officer met Collins, his hands and clothes stained with blood, walking calmly out through the farm gateway, carrying in one hand the BOWL CONTAINING A HUMAN HEAD and in the other the double barrelled gun and some dead chickens. Cook asked him what he had been doing, to which Collins replied that he had been killing a sheep…and handed the constable the bowl with its ghastly contents. Cook cried out ‘Why, you have committed murder! ’Collins, in a dazed style, replied ‘Have I? I am sorry. Let me kiss you,’ and suiting the action to the word, the murderer stooped down to embrace the policeman.” Daily Mail, 13 September 1896

23. Today’s Objectives 1 To understand the birth of the New Journalism 2 The parts played by W T Stead and Alfred Harmsworth 3 Why New Journalism was controversial • Profit versus education • Analysis versus cheerleading • Liberalism betrayed? 4 The commercial value of hard news