Abstract
Four months after the new century began, the halfpenny Daily Express, the most Americanized newspaper to appear in Britain up to that time, commenced publication. Founded by Charles Arthur Pearson, its most illustrious days lay ahead of it after Beaverbrook gained financial control during the First World War and Arthur Christiansen became editor in 1933. Yet from the outset, it plowed new ground with a front page given over to news (“nothing like having your best goods in the shop-front window,” observed Stead1), and it rapidly amassed a readership of several hundred thousand. Its selling points were derived almost entirely from transatlantic models. Pearson was an enthusiast for all things American and he visited the United States several times before launching his newspaper. As early as 1895 he had conceived of publishing a daily paper in London that was to be aimed primarily at American readers. Nothing resulted from this project, but from the very outset the Daily Express was an “American-style” product transplanted to British shores, as became evident in 1902 when Blumenfeld was appointed editor.
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Notes
David Butler and Gareth Butler, British Political Facts, 1900–1985 ( Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986 ), 494–5.
Sidney Dark, Mainly About Other People ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925 ), 12.
Michael L. Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age ( Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997 ), 43.
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Franc B. Wilkie, Sketches Beyond the Sea (Chicago: Belford, Clark, 1880), 77; Springfield, Some Piquant People, 129.
Cecil Carnes, Jimmy Hare, News Photographer: Half a Century with a Camera, ( New York: Macmillan, 1940 ), 193.
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George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), chapter 9.
David Christie Murray, Recollections (London: John Long, 1908), 103; Watson, Newspaper Man’s Memories, 204.
Julian Ralph, The Making of a Journalist (London: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 179; Mansfield, Complete Journalist, 129.
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Francis H. Low, Press Work for Women: A Text Book for the Young Woman Journalist ( London: L. Upcott-Gill, 1904 ), 13
Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 21. The quote about Marshall is in Anna Sebba, Battling for the News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter (London: Hodder, Stoughton, 1994 ), 52.
See Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 )
Patricia Bradley, Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), especially 115–39.
See Harnett T. Kane and Ella Bentley Arthur, Dear Dorothy Dix: The Story of a Compassionate Woman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1952). Her credo is in Ross, Ladies of the Press, 67.
H. W. Boynton, Journalism and Literature and Other Essays ( Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904 ), 12.
E. L. Godkin, “Newspapers Here and Abroad,” North American Review, CL (1890), 202.
Betty Houchin Winfield, “Emerging Professionalism and Modernity,” in Winfield (ed.), Journalism 1908: Birth of a Profession ( Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008 ), 1.
Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 ), 400.
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© 2011 Joel H. Wiener
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Wiener, J.H. (2011). The Modernization of Journalism. In: The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_10
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