The development and impact of campaigning journalism in Britain, 1840-1875 : the old new journalism?

Score, Melissa Jean (2015) The development and impact of campaigning journalism in Britain, 1840-1875 : the old new journalism? PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis examines the development of campaigning writing in newspapers and periodicals between 1840 and 1875 and its relationship to concepts of Old and New Journalism. Campaigning is often regarded as characteristic of the New Journalism of the fin de siècle, particularly in the form associated with W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s. New Journalism was persuasive, opinionated, and sensational. It displayed characteristics of the American mass-circulation press, including eye-catching headlines on newspaper front pages. The period covered by this thesis begins in 1840, with the Chartist Northern Star as the hub of a campaign on behalf of the leaders of the Newport rising of November 1839. It ends in 1875, on the cusp of the New Journalism, a year before Stead published his reports condemning Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in the regional daily, the Northern Echo. I argue that characteristics of New Journalism, such as persuasive writing and sensational revelations, were evident before 1875, particularly in the development of campaigning journalism in this period. Chapter 1 examines the context and definitions of campaigning journalism in relation to Old and New Journalism. Chapter 2 focuses on the genre of investigative writing, examining techniques such as interviewing and undercover reporting and their impact on New Journalism. Chapter 3 considers ways in which campaigning ideas were communicated through networks. Chapter 4 interrogates concepts of ‘popular’, ‘radical’, and ‘commercial’ by analysing three popular Sunday newspapers — the News of the World, Lloyd’s Weekly News, and Reynolds’s Newspaper — and their selection of campaigns. Chapter 5 examines how the press presented the second phase of the movement to repeal the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, between 1849 and 1869, a campaign that was directly relevant to the economic and regulatory framework in which books, newspapers, and periodicals were produced.

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