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Chapter 4

Tabloidization: What is it, and Does it Really Matter?

S. Elizabeth Bird

The word “tabloidization” is relatively new, achieving wide currency since the 1980s. The process itself – which has come to be understood as stylistic and content changes that represent a decline in traditional journalistic standards – has been “lamented”1 for a century or more. The problem with the word is that, perhaps like “obscenity,” everyone seems to recognize it when they see it, but no one really agrees what it is. Tabloids and their earlier precursors have long functioned as a convenient demon figure for “real” journalism, which has used them to draw boundaries between good and bad journalistic practices.2

Those boundaries, however, have constantly shifted with changing tastes and media environments. And today, when the environment for journalism has been so radically transformed, my concern is that the still-continuing lament about “tabloidization” may be a distraction from forces that are much more real, a point to which I will return.

Tabloidization: desperately seeking a definition

First, a word about tabloids and tabloidization. Strictly speaking, the term “tabloid” simply refers to certain newspapers’ size, which is half that of a standard broadsheet. However, over the years it has taken on a much broader definition that has less to do with size and more to do with the presentation and style of news. Tabloid style has come to be understood as a particular kind of formulaic, colorful narrative related to, but usually perceived as dis- tinct from standard, “objective” styles of journalism. The tabloid style is con- sistently seen by critics as inferior, appealing to base instincts and public demand for sensationalism. True “tabloids” emerged in Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century, and in the USA in the 1920s. Entertainingly sensational, they were written in the idioms of the people, as William Ran- dolph Hearst proudly declared when launching the American Daily Mirror in 1924.3 The tension between a perception of tabloid style as representing the legitimate desires and voice of the people, or as representing a vulgarization of public discourse, has been at the heart of the debate about tabloidization ever since, as Gans suggests in this volume.

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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The tabloid is not necessarily defined by content; tabloids may cover the same topics as mainstream journalism, although typically more briefly and flamboyantly.4 British daily tabloids, such as the Sun, cover politics and “hard” news, although much more briefly and superficially than “quality” newspapers, while much of their space is devoted to celebrity news, sensational human interest stories, advice, and so on.5 Their US daily counterparts, such as the New York Daily News, have a similar mix of news and entertainment, while US weekly supermarket tabloids, such as the National Enquirer or Star, rarely touch hard news at all. Publications recognizable as tabloids across the world contain variable mixes of news, entertainment, sports, and other features, usually with heavy use of illustration.6

If “tabloid” has come to mean a specific style, “tabloidization” is a more recent term developed to describe an inexorable move toward that style by “real” journalism. Long before the term was actually coined, tabloidization was a focus of criticism and concern that began with the emergence of more popular journalistic formats, such as the “penny press” of the 1830s, whose writers drew on the formulaic conventions of broadsheets and ballads to pro- duce dramatic, human interest news of crime and mayhem, frequently with an implied or overt moral. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critics bemoaned the cheapening of public discourse represented by such populariza- tion of news, and this lament has gathered speed over the last 100 years. In the late twentieth century, the term “tabloidization” appeared, and came to con- note a serious decline in journalistic discourse, whether in television or print. As Colin Sparks wrote, tabloidization implied that “the high standards of yesterday are being undermined by sensationalism, prurience, triviality, malice, and plain, simple credulity.”7

The problem, as I have mentioned, is that tabloidization is not a clearly defined term; neither journalists nor critics agree precisely what it is, or even whether it is invariably a negative force. Indeed, as Sparks showed, empirical attempts to demonstrate the process have been inconclusive. However, there appear to be some key areas in which most critics (as well as the general public) recognize the phenomenon. Generally, these can be seen as issues of either style or content, although these are clearly closely related. Under style, we can look at writing techniques, observed in a movement away from longer, complex, analytical writing into shorter, punchier sentences, primarily in a narrative, rather than analytical mode. Second, we see an increasing emphasis on the personal; for instance, journalists handle major economic themes through personal stories about individual people and the way they cope. A third symptom of tabloidization is a greater use of visual images, including photos, artists’ sketches and so on, as well as increased reliance on such techniques as re-enactments and dramatizations, primarily in electronic news.

Tabloidization of content is usually framed in terms of increasing triviali- zation. Celebrity news and gossip are seen to be crowding out serious news, and human interest stories receive more coverage than important international

Tabloidization 41

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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events. Critics also point to changes such as the move toward covering poli- tical debate as horse races (in election coverage) or as shouting matches on talk shows and other venues, both of which detract from serious and nuanced debate and analysis.8 For Tannen, tabloidization is one feature of what she dubs the contemporary “argument culture.”9

The specific term tabloidization arose in the context of changes in tradi- tional news that created great anxiety. It was first used widely in the USA to describe and often decry the emergence of the national newspaper USA Today, launched in 1982 by Al Neuharth, then heading the Gannett chain. Many critics and journalists despised the paper, but of course it went on to become a great success, and by the early 2000s Neuharth enjoyed the status of a press elder statesman. Without a doubt, USA Today’s stylistic innovations led to significant changes in print journalism, and by now such changes are generally regarded as positive and revitalizing. This progression points to the way in which the very meaning of “tabloidization” continually shifts, as changes once seen as evidence of decline become mainstreamed, if they prove successful.

The contexts of tabloidization

So it is important to consider tabloidization in context. A movement to clearer, more accessible news that speaks more directly to readers does not necessarily equate with a decline in standards. For instance, Hallin10 reports that in Mexico, these kinds of stylistic changes have signaled positive forces for social reform and democratic participation, as elite controls on news have loosened. Similar changes are noted in former Eastern bloc nations, where the emergence of more personal, snappier, and tabloid-like styles go hand-in-hand with a more open and accessible press – just as they did in Europe and the USA as journalistic style changed in the nineteenth century. Several commen- tators have pointed out that if done well, “tabloid” features, such as emphasis on the personal over the institutional, can make news more direct and effective.12

The downside of this is of course that a focus on the personal can obscure larger social, political, and cultural factors, a point made by many writers, such as Campbell.11

Thus it is important to understand cultural specificities when discussing tabloidization, or any other journalistic quality. For instance, even in two societies as apparently similar as Britain and the USA, there are significant differences in tabloid media, and thus the implications of tabloidization can also differ. US supermarket tabloids and UK daily tabloids feature similar lay- outs, writing styles, and a celebrity focus, and journalists have moved com- fortably between the two genres for years. However, they are in many ways different, reflecting quite distinct cultural milieus. British tabloids are explicit, visually and verbally, about sex, while US weeklies avoid direct references. And while some US weeklies are far more interested in paranormal and religious topics, such as biblical prophecies and faith healing, British tabloids reflect a

42 S. Elizabeth Bird

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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much greater sense of working-class consciousness than those in the USA, where “everyone is middle-class.” Tabloid-style media in other countries also reflect a range of social, political, and cultural characteristics; when we discuss “tabloidization,” we may mean very different things depending on context.

So there simply is no single, clear definition of tabloidization. When broken down to its constituent elements, such as changes in style, a move toward accessibility and personalization, it becomes a difficult target to see clearly. In part this is because, although tabloidization is usually seen as antithetical to traditional journalistic standards of truth and objectivity, exactly what those standards are has never been entirely clear. For instance, there has always been some degree of discomfort both within journalism and among news audiences about whether news can be genuinely informative when using a narrative or storytelling format. “Mere storytelling” is often cited pejoratively as a sig- nificant marker of tabloidization, while at the same time, journalists know (and research is confirming) that telling compelling stories can reach audiences in ways that “objective” accounts cannot.13 Journalists have long been encouraged to see large issues in personal terms, knowing that members of the public are not well informed if they simply reject the news out of boredom. Is writing that speaks to the heart necessarily symptomatic of tabloidization and is thus bad? Consensus simply doesn’t exist.

As an example, I have noted elsewhere consider the regular balancing act newspapers must perform when they try ambitious, basically ethnographic stories. My local newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, fairly regularly offers extended, often multi-part stories that explore various kinds of human experience, such as a 2003 series that used a total of almost 40,000 words and several reporters to look in depth at the lives of a few adolescents.14 The reaction from readers, as expressed in letters to the editor, was bi-polar; some found it “well written, truthful,” or praised its “justice, explanation, sym- pathy, and beauty.” Others were “astounded, disgusted, and outraged,” calling it a “silly series.” Inevitably, comments included comparisons with tabloids – “I expect this kind of thing in the National Enquirer, not a respectable news- paper.” Indeed, this is a constant refrain from readers whenever something offends them, showing how entrenched the demonization of the tabloid actually is, even though one person’s outrage is another one’s admiration.

The lack of consensus about what tabloidization means is one of the reasons to argue that tabloidization does not matter – how can we fix it if we don’t know what it is? Furthermore, there is ample evidence to suggest that a certain tabloidization of style, such as the emphasis on storytelling that engages senses and emotions, actually enhances good journalism. Nevertheless, some of the issues that surface in the tabloidization discussion are still important. Jour- nalism is changing because the tradition of newspaper reading is clearly on the decline, with younger readers apparently not taking up the habit as they grow older. The competition for news has become increasingly fierce, with proliferating broadcast outlets, as well as the enormous impact of the internet,

Tabloidization 43

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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which has led traditional media to rethink many of their familiar practices. The internet’s promise of democratization raised hopes that this would offer a much greater variety of serious, international news. To some extent it has, but at the same time it seems clear that what has often happened is that more time than ever is being devoted to the kind of stories that are typically seen as tabloid.

I have long argued that storytelling is an essential component in effective journalism,15 and I still believe that. Indeed, the ability to tell complex stories effectively and authoritatively may be the key to the survival of newspapers. Nevertheless, the proliferation of some kinds of stories and the margin- alization of others does, I believe, constitute a threat to journalism as a cul- tural force. Arguably frivolous, tabloid-style narratives are important; as I have argued elsewhere,16 they allow audiences to interrogate morality, explore values, and connect with others – they are not about passing on essential information. They have always been part of news, in spite of critics who see them as anathema to real journalism. Stories about Anna Nicole Smith, the “runaway bride” and the tribulations of Brittney Spears or Paris Hilton pro- duce massive amounts of attractively open-ended speculation that makes such tales gripping. Audiences apparently want them; the most googled news topic for 2006 was Paris Hilton, followed by Orlando Bloom, although the top 10 also included Hurricane Katrina and “bankruptcy.”

However, the domination of the celebrity and human interest “celebrity for a day” story is not just about giving audiences what they want; it is also about the bottom line. That is why it is essential to add economics to the other terms we are addressing in this volume – tabloidization, technology, and truthiness – even if it doesn’t start with “t.” Editors find these stories easy, cheap, and popular. In a competitive, digital environment in which news organizations struggle to maintain independence and profit levels, the cheap, easy, and pop- ular story often wins out over expensive, difficult, and less popular ones. Pages of news space and hours of airtime can be filled without ever having to assign a reporter, as news outlets simply feed off each other.

And this is a major threat to journalism. The irony is that as more and more outlets for news open up, the range of alternative stories actually seems to be shrinking. And along with that, those in power seem to be becoming even more effective than ever at controlling the stories that then flood the mediascape.17 High-profile narratives of terrorism and war provide dramatic examples. The first Bush administration succeeded brilliantly in the first Gulf War in framing the story of a just, heroic, clinically scientific and very clean war, in an era when the internet was less fully developed. Surely, one would think, the second Bush administration would find this harder in the new news world? Yet, the government actually succeeded in framing the second Iraq War similarly, at least in the early stages.18 Indeed, its success in providing terms and frames that journalists found compelling helped form the backbone of the “story” of the war. The press used them so consistently that they become

44 S. Elizabeth Bird

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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“natural” and therefore “true,” from the highly successful “weapons of mass destruction,” to “shock and awe,” which formed the central frame of countless news articles and television broadcasts. This, along with government-supplied notions of “smart bombs” from the first war and the reluctance to provide images of “collateral damage” resulted in a particular and narrow “story” of a clean and successful war, established early in 2003 and built carefully since.19

Certainly that story started to fall apart, but arguably too late. In addition to the larger story of the war, the administration was extremely

effective in building and spreading particular narratives that both served its purpose and offered audiences emotional, resonant experiences. For instance, it took some years for the truth to emerge about the “heroic” death in Afghanistan of former National Football League star Pat Tillman in 2004. Most stories relied on a military spokesman, who said that Tillman was killed “in a firefight.” Reports of his last, heroic battle were steeped in the American cultural reso- nance of football and war, and received eagerly. Later, the “story” unraveled into a tale of military bungling and bureaucratic cover-up of a sorry “friendly fire” incident. A similar unraveling occurred in the Jessica Lynch story, ori- ginally presented as a tale of the teenage “girl soldier,” captured while fighting “like a man,” only to be rescued by brave troops. Later, Lynch herself repu- diated the heroic nature of the tale. Deepa Kumar argues that “constructed as hero, Lynch became a symbol of the West’s ‘enlightened’ attitude toward women, justifying the argument that the United States was ‘liberating’ the people of Iraq.”20 At the same time, the story evoked the cultural lexicon of “captivity narratives,” involving fair, lovely young women actually or potentially brutalized by dark, menacing savages. The story, in other words, was especially powerful (and dangerous) because it perfectly meshed existing, culturally resonant images with the needs of the US administration to create specific heroic tales, and, no doubt, the needs of the people to have such tales.

Of course, alternative accounts of such events are physically more available than ever – the new media environment has in some ways opened up the world, suggesting a kind of utopia in which we might see a true, Miltonian struggle from which truth emerges. Indeed, for the news consumer with sig- nificant tenacity and time, alternative stories abound. For instance, one might turn to the reporting of American independent journalist Dahr Jamail, which resulted in a book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq21, which paints a much more comprehensive pic- ture of life in Iraq than that provided by mainstream media. In his book, blogs, and public presentations, Jamail expresses his frustration that so few mainstream journalists in Iraq made any attempt at all to report news unfil- tered through official sources. At one level, we might argue that Jamail’s suc- cess shows that the new media environment has allowed unprecedented freedom of knowledge – his dispatches have been used by significant media outlets around the world. At the same time, the domination of mainstream US media still renders such alternatives largely invisible to most of the public,

Tabloidization 45

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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partly because most people simply do not have the time to pursue different versions, and partly because the economic cost of aggressive, investigative journalism is too high. As the sheer volume of information continues to increase, it seems that fewer and fewer competent journalists are actually out there gathering and creating new information. As Amy Goodman and Dennis Moynihan write in the forward to Jamail’s book: “If only the corporate net- works would devote a small per centage of their resources to the type of reporting that Dahr Jamail accomplishes with next to nothing. The prospect of such a media system depends on the demands and activism of the public, a public that holds the networks, the reporters, and elected officials accountable, and a public that supports independent media.”

I think in some ways we are at a critical point for journalism, as it relates to the public sphere. Multiple narratives now appear to compete with main- stream journalism to define the day’s stories. News audiences pick and choose stories they want to believe, from a seemingly endless supply of information from which to assemble their own versions of reality. Yet many choose to receive only news that is tailored to their existing opinions, even if drawn from multiple forms – Sean Hannity’s story is the same whether one receives it via his TV show, radio show, web site, or books. Others may be much more creative, disseminating their own stories on blogs, wikis, and personal web- sites. The internet does have the potential to provide genuine forums for alternative participation and even real action.

The production of content and tabloidization

However, how is all the root content actually being produced? Part of the earlier critique of tabloid journalism was that reporters gathered information through paid informants, gossip-mongers, and simple rumor; this outrage seems almost outdated now that anyone can post anything, without regard for verification, ethics or “truth” – resulting in the “truthiness” that others address more fully in this volume. In many ways, the conception of a huge world of information is an illusion, since so much of it is either unreliable or simply a variation of official accounts. And the growth of niche markets means that no news consumers ever need to leave their comfort zones.

As the latest report from the Pew Excellence in Journalism project suggests, news organizations seem very uncertain about how to participate in the new web environment.22 Mainstream journalism often seems to be simply replicat- ing its content in various different contexts – for instance, a regular news- paper, a smaller, tabloid version designed for young people, a website, a partnership with a TV news station, and so on. As Pew reports, “Sites have done more, for instance, to exploit immediacy, but they have done less to exploit the potential for depth.” I believe this potential for depth is where the mainstream media could go to reclaim their relevance. Part of that is, I think, a need to re-establish some kind of journalistic authority – not as an omniscient

46 S. Elizabeth Bird

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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arbiter of truth, but as a profession whose practitioners have knowledge and reporting skills that can offer audiences something more than mere “truthiness” and special interest information.

Of course the problem for news organizations is that their ability to under- take serious, in-depth, independent reporting, whether at home or abroad, is compromised by economics. As Pew also points out, the advertising base of newspapers has seriously eroded, and advertising on their internet branches has not replaced lost revenue. Attempts to charge for internet content have largely been abandoned; audiences will not pay for material they can get else- where. So what can newspapers do that makes them distinctive, and offers something different from everything else on the web?

One possibility is a renewed focus on significant reporting of local and regional news in a mixed print/online environment. For instance, Robinson reports on the vibrant and award-winning on-line presence of the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman Review. In a case study, she looks at coverage of a pedo- philia scandal involving the mayor of Spokane, in which a coherent, conven- tional story emerged in print over the course of a month-long investigation. However, simultaneous with the printed story, a “cyber newsroom” on the paper’s own website made available interviews, documents, and multiple forms of information, and people dissected and analyzed the information, often offering their own sometimes radically different versions of the “official” stories. Readers, interacting with journalists, the news content, and other readers, helped form an online news narrative:

If readers took issue with the coverage, they had the newspaper’s own space to criticize the journalism … Like reporters, readers utilized quota- tion marks and hyperlinks to source the material … This sharing of information production changed the dynamics of the journalism resulting in a re-negotiation of the news paradigm within cyberspace.23

Nolan notes that this kind of connectivity means that journalists become “less of an authority and more of a guide,” which some might see as a threat to journalism.24 However, in today’s highly relativistic, skeptical and cynical news environment, audiences may be very appreciative of an impartial voice to provide information and facilitate discussion – perhaps recreating some kind of political “center.” Newspapers can still tell stories of consequence that otherwise go untold and that resist government- and corporate-provided terms and themes, and they can invite readers into those stories in a form of parti- cipatory democracy. These stories require time, resources, and skills, but they help meet journalism’s obligations to do more than narrate the increasingly inconsequential tide of amusement, diversion and official spin that pervades the news media.

A recent experiment by the St. Petersburg Times offers another way for estab- lished news organizations to contribute in authoritative ways. In September,

Tabloidization 47

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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2007, the Times launched PolitiFact.com, a website that attempts to sort out the truth of politician’s campaigning, and run-in partnership with Congres- sional Quarterly. Managing Editor Neil Brown described the effort:

We believe our journalists can play a greater role as an honest broker for voters bewildered by the barrage of campaign talk. So in a move rare for a news organization, we’re dedicating a team of reporters and researchers to meticulously examine the rhetoric of candidates and their partisans, and then make a call: Is the claim true or not?25

Acknowledging the reality of the new media environment, Brown continues:

many news organizations can spend less money and get less grief if their political reporting sticks to stenography and puffery. It’s easier to record the words and claims of competing candidates than to vet their accuracy. It’s easier to write about the strategy of using negative advertising than to do the painstaking research to sort out whether the claim is actually true or false.

In the same introduction, Brown writes:

You might think such work would be standard journalistic fare. In fact, of course, the long-standing, if rather tattered, journalistic ideology of objectivity has meant exactly the opposite – journalists are supposed to report, not make judgments about whether something claimed is real. It is the very ideology of objectivity that supermarket tabloid writers evoke in justifying stories with patently outlandish claims; they are simply reporting objectively what someone told them.26

Such initiatives as PolitiFact point to the potential for a new kind of authority for journalism, which actually takes on “truthiness” head on. This role has not traditionally been tried by news organizations, being left largely to such outfits as Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania.

Significantly, both the St. Pete Times and the Spokesman Review constitute increasingly rare independent voices in journalism. The Times is owned by the Poynter Institute, the Review by the Cowles family – the present publisher William Stacey Cowles representing the fourth generation of his family to oversee the paper. In this environment, there is clearly more freedom to mini- mize the bottom line in favor of a fourth estate role that seems to have become increasingly irrelevant. As Times editor Brown writes, “we are true believers in journalism as an instrument of democracy. Even as we seek to reach custo- mers in new ways, we see our primary obligation as helping citizens partici- pate fully in the democratic process … PolitiFact fits with that mission.”

48 S. Elizabeth Bird

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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Tabloidization and the future of journalism

So, where is journalism going? Journalism is losing the confident sense of authority that still allows the New York Times to claim “all the news that’s fit to print,” and increasingly the profession seems to be panicking in an era when anyone can set up a virtual shop and claim to be a journalist. It seems jour- nalism may have two choices. It can accept that its claim to truth is no better or worse than anyone else’s, cling onto traditional notions of objectivity, and continue a struggle to survive in a relativistic, cynical world in which whatever sells leads. Or it can try to develop new ways of doing business, that involve a renewed commitment to actually doing journalism, and perhaps a rethinking of objectivity. One strategy might be a positive embrace of significant, ethno- graphic stories that invite readers into an experience that is simply not replic- able in the point-and-click world of the internet. Another would be to reduce dependence on official sources of information, and do more independent reporting. And another would be to embrace the participatory potential of the internet, drawing readers into dialog by providing good information and facilitating reasoned, democratic participation and discussion, where truth can be conceptualized without irony.

To return to my original question: I don’t believe tabloidization is a parti- cularly useful term any more (if it ever was). And I don’t worry that journal- ism includes supposedly trivial or emotion-laden stories of celebrities, everyday heroes, and so on. These have always been part of news, and they perform an important cultural role. The problem is when that role swamps the other important dimensions of what journalism can and should be. And so some of the themes that are often included in the imprecise term, tabloidization, are still vital to the future of journalism. But as long as we still fuss about the tabloids as representative of everything bad, we will be distracted from ser- iously addressing the more real challenges of maintaining journalistic authority in the age of truthiness.

Notes 1 John Langer, Tabloid Television (New York: Routledge, 1997). 2 See for example, Howard Kurtz, Media Circus: The Trouble with America’s Newspapers (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994).

3 S. Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

4 S. Elizabeth Bird, “Taking it Personally: Supermarket Tabloids after September 11,” in Journalism after September 11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen (London: Routledge, 2002), 141–59.

5 For a good history of the British tabloid press, see Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language (London: Routledge, 2006).

6 Colin Sparks and John Tulloch, eds. Tabloid Tales (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

7 Colin Sparks, “The Panic Over Tabloid News,” in Colin Sparks and John Tulloch, eds. Tabloid Tales (New York: Rowman and Littlefield), 1–40.

Tabloidization 49

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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8 See, for example, David J. Krajicek, Scooped! (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Kurtz, Media Circus.

9 Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

10 Daniel Hallin, “La Nota Roja: Popular Journalism and the Transition to Democracy in Mexico,” in Sparks and Tulloch (eds.), Tabloid Tales, 267–84.

11 Myra MacDonald, “Rethinking Personalization in Current Affairs Journalism,” in ed. Sparks and Tulloch, Tabloid Tales, 251–66.

12 Richard Campbell, 60 Minutes and the News – A Mythology for Middle America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

13 Marcel Machill, Sebastian Köhler and Markus Waldhauser, “The Use of Narrative Structures in Television News: An Experiment in Innovative Forms of Journalistic Presentation,” European Journal of Communication 22, no. 2 (2007): 185–205.

14 S. Elizabeth Bird, “The Journalist as Ethnographer: How Anthropology Can Enrich Journalistic Practice,” in Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman, eds. Media Anthropology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 220–28.

15 See, for example, S. Elizabeth Bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News,” in ed. James W. Carey, Media, Myths, and Narratives (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1988), 67–87; and S. Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds.

16 S. Elizabeth Bird, The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World (New York: Routledge, 2003).

17 S. Elizabeth Bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Rethinking News as Myth and Story- telling,” in ed. Karin Wahl-Jorgenson and Thomas Hanisch, Handbook of Journalism (London: Blackwell, 2008) 205–16.

18 See, for example, James R. Compton, The Integrated News Spectacle: A Political Economy of Cultural Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles (New York: Paradigm, 2005).

19 Compton, The Integrated News Spectacle; Kellner, Media Spectacle. 20 Deepa Kumar, “War propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Construction

of the Jessica Lynch Story,” Feminist Media Studies, 4, no. 3 (2004): 297–313. 21 Dahr Jamail, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist

in Occupied Iraq (New York: Haymarket Books, 2007). 22 Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The State of the Media Report,” available

online at: www.stateofthenewsmedia.org 23 Susan Robinson, “The Cyber Newsroom: A Case Study of the Journalistic Para-

digm in a News Narrative’s Journey from a Newspaper to Cyberspace.” Paper presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. March. Available online at: www.online.journalism.utexas.edu

24 Sybil Nolan, “Journalism Online: The Search for Narrative Form in a Multilinear World.” Proceedings of Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, available online at: www.hypertext.rmit.edu.au

25 Neil Brown, “The Truth is PolitiFact.com,” St Petersburg Times, September 2, available online at: www.sptimes.com

26 S. Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds.

50 S. Elizabeth Bird

Zelizer, Barbie. The Changing Faces of Journalism : Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=428389. Created from pensu on 2020-10-26 06:33:36.

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