Some notes on the newspaper

In the early years of the twenty-first century a newspaper looks like a clumsy thing. Outdated within hours, virtually worthless after its first purchase, expensive to produce, impossible to correct, difficult to distribute and, shortly afterwards, to destroy.

Not so 300 years ago. While everyone is arguing over the end of newspapers, it is quite interesting to also have a look at their beginnings.

At the start of the 1700s the newspaper was considered a great technological step forward. London led the way and by the middle of the century there were as many as 130 regional publications in circulation across the country. The newspaper had become an institution.

More than merely reporting happening events, newspapers provided useful information about meetings, prices – especially of corn and wheat – trade returns, bills of mortality and adverts.

Here’s an article from early on in the century, describing the bizarre effects that newspapers had on some obsessives:

(From the Bristol Mercury, 2 Aug. 1712)

About 1695 the press was again set to work, and such a furious itch of novelty has ever since been the epidemical distemper, that it has proved fatal to many families, the meanest of shopkeepers… spending whole days in coffee houses to hear news and talk politics, whilst their wives and children wanted bread at home, and their business being neglected, they were themselves thrown into gaol or forced to take sanctuary in the army.

By the end of the century, the newspaper’s place was so entrenched in society that the poet and naturalist George Crabbe was motivated to write a nimble poem in their honour:

I sing of NEWS, and all those vapid sheets

The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets;

Whate’er their name, whate’er the time they fly ;

Damp from the press, to charm the reader’s eye

- G. Crabbe – the Newspaper (1785)

A flaw, perhaps?

But at the same time other were noticing that newspapers were not without fault. The fact that each day they had to be filled to the same degree and length was seen as clumsy by some – one of whom was Henry Fielding, who wrote early on in The History of Tom Jones (Book II, Ch I)

Thought we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writer, who profess to disclose the revolution of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian who, to preserve the regulatory of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable areas when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage.

Such histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. They might likewise be compared to a stage coach, which performs constantly the same course, empty as well as full. The writer, indeed, seems to think himself obliged to keep even pace with time, whose amanuensis he is,

Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.

My reader then, is not to be surprised, if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapter very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly…

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These are some notes from an essay I have to write on the earliest days of the newspaper. Most of the examples come from Asa Briggs’ book – How They Lived – and the photo at the top is from mofotos‘ Flickr stream.

A sign of the times

This is from my colleague and all-round clever Swede, Magnus Nilsson.

A list of the ‘new’ super affiliates:

http://www.guardiandigitalcomparison.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/shopping

http://compare.independent.co.uk/

And let’s not stop at that. Why not scroll to the bottom of this page:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/

Yes. That big rolling banner? That’d be a big link to the ES’s affiliate page.

If you have no idea what I’m on about when I use the word affiliate, you might want to read this.

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image credit: adambowie

image credit: zipenfish

Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:

“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”

Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.

It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:

1. “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
2. “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
3. “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
4. “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)

When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:

“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”

Keyword journalism

SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:

“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”

Which is obviously very different to:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.

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Update:

As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.

Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.