Q&A with Terry Kirby: Is tabloid journalism history?

In his book, The Newsmongers - A History of Tabloid Journalism, Terry Kirby charts both its origins and modern day decline.

Patrick Edwards:   What is tabloid journalism and what distinguishes it from other forms of journalism?

Terry Kirby: Tabloid journalism has become a label for a certain strain of popular journalism. Popular journalism would be the preferred umbrella term, but tabloid is an easy point of reference for people.

If you take it back to the definition, tabloid was originally used by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and founder of the Daily Mail in the mid 1890s. The Mail was the first popular newspaper aimed at a different audience – the emerging new middle and industrial working classes. It was for people who had less time than the leisured and literary classes who were the focus of the Victorian broadsheets of the day. They delivered an extended journalism with huge pages of Parliamentary and court reports alongside long literary pieces and were aimed at a mainly male audience.

Harmsworth’s mission was to fill the gap between the new middle classes and the more educated working classes. This new audience had less time, working in offices or factories and commuting to and from work. Tabloid was a word in wide use at the time to describe a type of pill and Harmsworth adopted it to define not just a style but a physical type of journalism in a smaller paper, with pictures and headlines more prominent, along with a more concentrated style of delivery to meet the needs of this new readership.

PE: Why do we need a history of tabloid journalism? Who is a history of tabloid journalism for?

TK: That was my first question when I was asked to write the book, do we really need this? But after looking into it I realised that we did. Actually no one has done a history of tabloid journalism.

There have been individual accounts from tabloid hacks which are all very subjective. There has also been some purely academic work. I’d argue that the book isn’t a completely academic piece of research, it’s a history book looking at tabloid journalism from its origins against a broader historical context while being as objective as possible.

PE: Your book I think makes a case for historical continuity between earlier iterations of popular journalism – newsletters, illustrated news, yellow press – and the tabloid journalism of today, but is this the case?

TK: I think the terms popular and tabloid journalism overlap and that continuities between them are easier to see when we are clear about the context we are in and the specific publications we are talking about. The Daily Mail would always argue that it was never a tabloid paper but there is no doubt - from a historical perspective – that it reflected tabloid values. The continuities are also reflected in a type of journalism that convened and leveraged popular appeal while addressing a new audience.

PE: Must popular journalism always be prurient and appealing to the lowest common denominator of our interests and concerns?

TK: I’d say that the Daily Mirror of the pre and post war era under Hugh Cudlipp, did proper reporting, was politically and socially engaged and always on the side of the broader population. But that, sadly, didn’t stop him from presiding over the Sunday Mirror when, in 1963, it published a guide headlined  “How to spot a possible homo”!  And whatever its faults, the Daily Mail’s campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice was serious and important.

PE: The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press lifted the lid on tabloid media newsrooms. What lessons, if any, have tabloid media learnt from this period?

TK: I think by the time Leveson reported in 2012 the world had moved on. The dark arts that led to Leveson were in a way not as widespread as they were prior to this point because there was less need for them to provide content.

In the period from the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s there was a kind of technological gap – bought about by the increased take up mobile phones and computerisation of records with still limited security measures- that was exploited by journalists prepared to break these rules in a period of ferocious competition.  Then, the world caught up. By the second decade of the century the needs that these journalists had for exclusive pictures and scurrilous stories was being largely met by the growth of social media – they didn’t need to follow people around because they were volunteering that content on Instagram and elsewhere.

Overall, a generation has passed on, retired, reformed, and moved on, leaving their successors churning out clickbait.

PE: The book’s timing coming out just before the General Election was apt, was it the tabloids wot won it for Labour?  If not does the current moment show a diminishing influence of tabloid media? Is this a good thing?

TK: The power of the tabloids is no way near what it was. The fact that The Sun waited until the last moment to endorse Starmer was a sign of their lack of enthusiasm about him. The tabloids didn’t win it for Starmer, but they didn’t lose it for him either.

PE: Is there a future for tabloid journalism and is it in the same form?

TK: Printed tabloid newspapers will not last forever. They may exist in some limited fashion but eventually everything will move online.  But it won’t necessarily be accessed by going to the Daily Mirror or The Sun’s web pages. Instead, readers will access these stories via social media. It will be a buffet of things via Instagram Reels and various feeds. They will click on stories – one day it might be from the Sun the next day someone else and may or may not take them back to the paper’s website. It will be a much more complex, multi-layered world.