Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2014

As of 24 April 2015, this article is available as Open Access under a CC-BY license.

This study suggests a time frame for the emergence of a modern news writing style in a mass-market English provincial newspaper. A qualitative analysis of a sample of the Midland Daily Telegraph between 1895 and 1905 demonstrates the process by which news becomes increasingly presented according to the conventions of the inverted pyramid by identifying key shifts in writing style. This methodology draws on the research carried out by Pottker (2003). At the same time elements of editorial innovation (namely developments in the labelling and organisation of content, an increased emphasis on sport, the organisation and presentation of advertisements and the paper’s promotion of itself as an advertising medium) are identified to demonstrate that this evening paper is developing rapidly as a commercial product. As such it supports Pottker’s (2003, 501) suggestion that news writing is one method by which a paper improves its “communicative quality” with its readers in order to improve its commercial impact.

The Mold Riots of 1869 came at a time of social and cultural upheaval throughout Wales, with Welsh identity becoming politicised for the first time. In the particular context of north-east Wales, the coverage of the Mold Riots in the local press reveals an early attempt to negotiate identity politics through newspaper editorials and evolving forms of journalistic language in a semi-anglicised border region in which questions of religion, language, class and loyalty were emerging as divisive political issues. It argues that contemporary coverage of the aftermath of the riots offers an insight into an early politicised form of journalistic leader column which allowed local newspapers, all of which had a cross-border remit, to articulate their own interpretations of political and national identity.

This study makes use of a range of local and national British newspapers and periodicals to examine the discourses of public health during the nineteenth century. It argues that many newspapers and periodicals used a very limited and limiting discourse to present often complex details to their readership. There was a heavy reliance on the use of established experts whose language was allowed to define the journalistic coverage of the subject with the result that other voices were marginalised or unheard altogether. Certain minority groups such as the Irish and women were stigmatised and blamed for the increase in public health problems. All of this combined to constrain the reporting of this crucial issue. The impact of an increasingly competitive print media environment also propelled this form of journalism towards extremes of language and of emphasis, resulting in an even more limited discourse.

The appearance of sports reporting was among the major developments of nineteenth-century journalism. While sports were only very exceptionally covered in the newspapers during the first half of the century, by the end of the Victorian era a diverse array of sports stories provided staple content for the pages of both broadsheet and popular papers. Dealing with the phenomenon of football match reports in The Times, this article documents the early specimens of the novel genre from the 1860s and the 1870s, tracing some of the linguistic forms and structural features that characterise the early search for the discursive conventions of the new genre. By focusing on a popular topic in a serious newspaper, the analysis illustrates that the emergence of the popular topic of football in a serious daily newspaper was not only very gradual and tentative, but was also marked with substantial uncertainty about the macrostructural and microstructural composition of the reports.

This paper studies political language in late nineteenth century partisan newspapers by (a) evaluating the degree of pragmatic force, or ideological closure in political editorial content published during the 1872 election year in three leading Iowa newspapers; and (b) linking variations in the degree of ideological closure of these texts to the institutional and social-political contexts of their production, i.e. the political role of editors and the web of relationships within which they performed their work. The degree of ideological closure is evaluated by analysing a range of rhetorical and discursive practices. The study identified variations in degree of closure both between newspapers affiliated with the same party and within a single newspaper over time. Such variations are interpreted as reflecting editors’ need to mitigate an intricate set of political interests and obligations. The analysis also brings to light the richness of partisan editorial language of this time. These finds demonstrate the complexity of the political language and discourse of Gilded Age newspapers.

Content analysis is the most common approach to exploring the use of specific words within media studies. This approach has significant limitations that can be addressed through the application of other related approaches to understanding mediated content, including sociolinguistics and conceptual history. The emergence of large databases of digitized newspapers opens the possibility of an integrated approach that draws on elements of each of those related paradigms. An analysis of the rise and fall of the terms “jingo” and “jingoism” in the British press from 1878 to 1900 demonstrates how this integrated research paradigm can be productively applied to gain insight into how newspapers serve to broadly distribute words attached to specific concepts.

Journalistic discourse, the world over, has developed over time, reflecting changes in the news industry and the wider society. Likewise television criticism, a specific form of journalism, has also had to evolve over time. Initially, as television critics sought recognition and respectability in the quality newspapers, they developed a form of writing similar to the way other forms of culture and art were reviewed. However, as journalists began to develop more popular ways of writing, and with the spread of soft news throughout newspapers and into new magazine supplements, television critics also found themselves having to follow suit. This was such that by the 1970s a number of critics had moved away from trying to mimic other forms of reviewing or criticism to creating their own, more popular form of discourse. In this article I will explore some of the ways the language of critics changed between the 1950s and the 1980s, and how these developments were similar or different to the wider changes in journalism happening at this time.