What the Papers Said
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Who can forget it? I certainly can’t. It was one of those unique moments that only happen once in a lifetime, moments in which time stands still and collective jaws hit the floor. The year was 2001, the month was September, and the day was the twelfth. Eh? Yes, that was the only day I ever knew when the newspaper shelf at my local Co-Op was empty. Something must have happened the day before to prompt those who wouldn’t normally bother to rush out and purchase a paper.
Maybe back in the 1950s and 60s, when sales of daily papers were at their peak, what I’ve only experienced once was a regular occurrence? There were certainly plenty of earth-shattering headlines during this period, from the JFK assassination to the first Moon Landing, to warrant clearing the newsstands – although many still had a morning paper delivered along with their morning milk back then, ensuring they’d always have a copy with their name scrawled on it. Talk of Golden Ages tends to tempt the donning of glasses with lenses tinted in rose, but when it comes to the British press, the immediate post-war decades were really the last time the public turned to Fleet Street as their primary source of news. And in populist terms, the most successful papers combined hard news with the appetite for scandal and sensationalism that can almost be traced back to the popular press’s very beginnings, when literacy was becoming more widespread than it had ever been before.
The Victorian penny dreadfuls that salivated over the dramatic Whitechapel Murders laid the foundations for the next century of Fleet Street produce, and the popular press has gleefully built upon those foundations ever since. At the same time, however, there is a strong tradition of investigative journalism that has run parallel with the more salacious inclinations of the press, and both strands of Fleet Street long maintained an uneasy coexistence until one won out over the other.
A true pioneer who managed to combine both the sensationalist and investigative elements of the early newspapers to a remarkably successful effect was William Thomas Stead, a journalist at leading Victorian evening paper, ‘The Pall Mall Gazette’. The story for which he is most well-known was of a kind that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a Fleet Street tabloid in the 21st Century – an exposé of child prostitution. In the best tradition of the moral crusades spearheaded by Victorian reformers, Stead railed against the sexual exploitation of children on the streets of London in a series of articles in 1885 that uncovered the seedy underbelly of the capital in a way that had never been seen in print before. He ‘bought’ a 13-year-old girl in order to demonstrate the outrageous ease with which such a transaction could be achieved, but was eventually charged with purchasing the child without her father’s permission and served a three-month prison sentence, a punishment that effectively ended his career at the Pall Mall Gazette, even though his campaign helped force through a change in the laws regarding the age of consent.
However, for all his admirable efforts in exposing a ghastly rookery of Victorian society, the manner in which Stead presented his findings bore all the familiar trademark signs of lurid tabloid sensationalism, with headlines such as The Confessions of a Brothel-Keeper and The Violation of Virgins; and the articles were all published under the melodramatic title, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. Stead’s reports were received by the general public with a fanatical fervour that would be recognisable to anyone who has lived through more recent examples of hysteria whipped-up by the press – especially when it stems from a case of child sexual abuse; the Gazette became the best-selling paper in the country overnight, and the lessons it taught Fleet Street, that the two opposing strands of newspaper journalism could be brought together and merge as one spectacularly successful whole, didn’t go unnoticed.
The ‘quality’ papers looked down on what they viewed as Stead’s vulgar titillation with disdain and refrained from such lascivious headlines; but the popular press quickly acquired a large and devoted readership by pandering to the public’s inherent desire to experience the wild side of life by vicarious means and a formula was established that would serve Fleet Street well for the next 100 years. For papers that aspired to quality status whilst retaining an appeal for those who sought their thrills in a little scandal, the balance was often tenuous, but before TV became the prime news service for Joe Public, both factions managed to maintain a mutually beneficent equilibrium. The Daily Mirror was the tabloid market-leader during the 50s and 60s, mixing gossipy showbiz news with strong campaigning journalism; the populist angle sold copies and the campaigns earned plaudits; the success of the former made investment in the latter possible. It also proved to be a useful breeding ground for the journalists who would gradually make their mark on television, which would take the approach to hard populist journalism of the Mirror and expand its horizons on programmes such as ITV’s ‘World in Action’.
The Daily Mirror was the newspaper of the working-class, a staunch Labour supporter whose introduction of a Northern edition printed in Manchester solidified its appeal, as did the iconic comic-strip, Andy Capp. By the mid-60s, it was selling five million editions a day and had become so successful that the IPC (publishers of the Mirror) purchased failing rival paper, The Daily Herald, re-launching it in 1964 as a mid-market broadsheet called The Sun. However, the Sun was unable to reverse the plummeting fortunes of its former incarnation, and after five years, the IPC decided to sell the paper, feeling it didn’t have much of a future. The unexpected battle to capture the Sun in 1969 took the IPC by surprise, but the two men who sidled up to each other in a bid to stake a claim in the profitable tabloid market would redesign the popular press in their own image, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. The Digger’s eventual purchase of the Sun coincided with the advent of the Permissive Society, enabling him to utilise sex as a selling point in tandem with a heavy emphasis on sport and celebrity, something that began in earnest with the rise of Princess Diana and continued with Posh & Becks; the phenomenal success of this recipe ensured the tabloid market entered not so much its second childhood as its second adolescence.
Maxwell may have long since disappeared for a date with Neptune, but Murdoch’s geriatric presence still hovers over the remnants of Fleet Street like the distant ghostly rattle of typewriters and the faint echo of an exasperated publican shouting ‘Time, gentlemen, please’ in the middle of the afternoon. Only diehard devotees of the print medium depend upon it as the best provider of news now, mainly because they always have; when they are gone, where will the next audience come from? The morning paper sticking through the letterbox is as rare a sight these days as a pint on the doorstep. Indeed, the only time the traditional press experiences any real upsurge of sales in the 21st century is when a major news story breaks, whether the hacking scandal, the expenses row or the kind of horrific event witnessed last week in Paris. There is still a lingering instinct in the public to reach for a paper when something serious happens, yet the press continues to rigidly favour a daily diet of trivia over hard news, despite the evidence that those who wallow in it get their trivia hit online in 2015.
The solution of sacking long-serving journalists and replacing them either with internet-savvy interns or encouraging contributions from members of the public, jettisoning entire sections of a paper and clogging-up the online editions with scantily clad starlets is seen by many proprietors as the way forward; yet, such an approach has helped bring the Daily Telegraph to its knees over the past eighteen months. One would think the press would return to what it does best to combat the challenge of the internet; it can’t compete with it in the trivia stakes, so why not stick to actual news stories written by those who have studied their specialist subjects for many years and are an authority on them? Failing that, why not recruit the excellent online writers that are out there? Or maybe the physical paper as a news source is already too far on its way to joining the Town Crier to save.
Petunia Winegum
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January 13, 2015 at 9:39 am -
What a brilliant and interesting article. Yes, they should be recruiting and paying you!
the manner in which Stead presented his findings bore all the familiar trademark signs of lurid tabloid sensationalism
His successors seem to be doing him proud. With orgies, a comedian and a Darren, what’s not to like?!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/westminster-paedophile-ring-top-tory-4957409-
January 13, 2015 at 10:28 am -
Cheers for the thumbs-up. It seems Stead was both a man of his time and a man ahead of his time.
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January 13, 2015 at 10:35 am -
I noticed after sending that Mirror link that it says “Read more on this story with our investigative partner Exaro”. That seems to chime with what you say about sensationalism versus investigative journalism. I wonder how reliable Exaro is.
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January 14, 2015 at 4:57 pm -
They have been reliable in the past, revealing several financial scandals – the editor Mark Watts is a former business journalist. From my reading, Exaro’s journalists undoubtedly know Fleet Street and the financial sector very well.
I think, however, with this Westminster paedos and Elm House stuff, they’re in way over their heads. They’re like the brilliant scientists who are easily fooled by simple magic tricks.
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January 13, 2015 at 10:01 am -
I gave up buying the Telegraph, which I had bought for all of my working life, as its standards and real news content began to fall. Gone are the days when it had its own reporters who travelled the world to provide first hand news and it provided authoritative articles on many topics of interest. Now it is all agency reports, edited by apparent illiterates who don’t even seem to read what they have written. It was renowned for its foreign news, but now this is rubbish! It’s far better to read the actual foreign sources on the internet, English versions of the news can be found for most countries, and certainly the ones that I’m interested in. I suspect that all that will remain in the future will be specialist publications, but even there, many are already looking at publishing in electronic form. I now buy a paper once a week on a Saturday because it provides the following week’s TV programmes, it is cheaper than buying one of the TV magazines (or even free if I buy a few things at Waitrose!).
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January 13, 2015 at 10:27 am -
Superb, Grasshopper, I am sooo proud of you.
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January 13, 2015 at 10:28 am -
January 13, 2015 at 10:37 am -
@Anna Raccoon I am sooo proud of you.
Rightly so I think …a really great and amusing (Maxwell may have long since disappeared for a date with Neptune) canter through the history of the dead tree media. Like English pensioner I cancelled my subscription to the Telegraph but that was your fault Anna in debunking the Savile scandal ….I am not big on paying money and wasting time to be misinformed…..better no news than wrong news
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January 13, 2015 at 10:55 am -
Like EP, I have read the Telegraph all my life (78 and rising). I gave up buying it last May because of its snide attitude to Nigel Farage and his party. I notice this morning that it printed the front page of Charlie Hebdo – no it didn’t. It printed the top third, omitting the cartoon of the alleged prophet. It also colluded with the rigged photographs of the rally in Paris, omitting the shot that showed the “leaders” had their own parade, well away from the unwashed masses.
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January 13, 2015 at 11:24 am -
On the other hand it was The Telegraph that got the MP Expenses story and that has surely done more than any other event to enable the rise of UKIP, with the complete elimination of any trust the British people had in their political classes. Unlike the Max Clifford Tory Sleaze Campaign of the Nineties, the Expenses scandal tarred all parties and the general ‘political’ approach of the Telegraph seems very akin to UKIP. I’m reminded of Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch. It#’s certainly hard to see the Telegraph objecting to a fundamental and permanent shift to “the Right” in British politics.
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January 13, 2015 at 11:52 am -
@Moor Larkin …..On the other hand it was The Telegraph
I will give you that Moor and the Telegraph is the best of a bad bunch but does come up with the goods every once in a while.
Below is an interesting take by the telegraph on free speech and Charlie Hebdo well before the recent tragedy
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/4351672/French-cartoonist-Sine-on-trial-on-charges-of-anti-Semitism-over-Sarkozy-jibe.html-
January 13, 2015 at 12:06 pm -
A very well written and thought provoking article Petunia. Kudos for Fat Steve for finding a 2009 edition of the Telegraph. With everything considered the Telegraph is well worth its online subscription for this old fellow living in the deep sticks.
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January 13, 2015 at 1:56 pm -
I agree, the Telegraph is the best of a dire crop. We have to make our judgements about content, but that’s part of the game. As Moor L. has said, the MPs expenses story was good. There’s nothing like getting our prejudices so thoroughly confirmed.
I started buying it when the Times went tabloid and dived off a cliff.
I don’t know what it is about broadsheet, but I like it, and the Telegraph crossword is ideal for the gap between lunch & afternoon nod off. Only problem is getting Pelican black out of shirt fronts; you can’t.
I do think £1.40 is too much, so local Waitrose obliges often. Come tabloid Telegraph day, that’ll be it. -
January 13, 2015 at 2:41 pm -
A few years ago the Telegraph was running a furious campaign to get me to subscribe. They were offering a yearly subscription for a ridiculously low price. I never did so partly because I knew I would have no time to read the thing but also because I’d never like their typescript and their page layouts. I disliked the Express for the same reason. My favourite paper for aesthetics was The Times but once it went tabloid I decided The Mail would do. I read a Times in the local cafe recently (free copies on the wall to borrow) and found it’s reportage writing so blandly written it made the news actually boring and it’s Feature writers seemed not so different to the Grauniad quite frankly even though supposedly they’re on opposite teams.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:29 pm -
The general ‘political’ approach of the DT has widened, with sustained attacks on any vaguely authorititive figure or body. It seems to promote a general political nihilism, and, for all its faults, I am not sure that you can say the same of UKIP.
Furthermore, I don’t think those who call the shots on the paper are under any illusions that UKIP is going to get its act together before the next decade is out, and I doubt whether they see much in the Conservative party that reflects their real interests either. Personally, I’m not convinced that the Barclay brothers have much invested in the democratic process full stop, so it will be interesting to see how the DT mutates in the next few years. I get my free copies courtesy of Mum.
Its foreign reporting is no more than a series of op eds anyway. I subscribe to the ‘I’ paper daily as it gives a better resume of what goes on beyond our shores and the Sunday Times for arts and culture.
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January 13, 2015 at 8:56 pm -
Oddly, the DT story on the MP expenses was one which made me question its real credibility
One of its ‘unsullied heroes’, ie those MPs it put forward at the time as deemed to be as pure and financially chaste as the driven snow, was one who might reasonably be assumed to have spent some considerable getting satirical blogs, which seemed to have been produced by constituency locals, taken down.
He also may well have been the prime mover in the disappearance of a neighbouring MPs blog, which included something to the effect that this MP had claimed expenses for residing in London, when they had gone home, or for a second property that didn’t exist – I can’t remember for certain. That blog also quoted this MP as stating how this additional benificence had been used.
If untrue, one might have expected legal action to follow, but I have seen no record of such. On the other hand, if these accusations were true, then the evidence might have been lost in the great prior purge of MP expense records which took place in, I think, 2004?
Seeing such, it did make me wonder just who the DT was really targeting, and why. Its motivations might have been less holy than it might have tried to portray them to be. But would that be anything new, of any newspaper?
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January 13, 2015 at 11:32 am -
I’d agree that The Telegraph isn’t what it was, but at least it still has something of a sense of humour, often reflected in the Letters page. A nice contrast to the po-faced, earnest and often downright santimonious Grauniad, Independent and even Times. Their pocket cartoonist, Matt, is also genuinely funny, and streets ahead of the often rather snide and nasty left-leaning examples in some other papers. Another plus for the Telegraph is that they’re prepared to report and discuss the economic state of EU and the travails of the Euro, which is a subject the BBC, for example, steers well clear of.
Another tabloid bastion my youth was the Express – a paper that is now a very pale shadow of it’s former self. If my parents bought a paper at all, it was either the Telegraph or the Express, the latter I suspect mainly for the Giles cartoon.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:24 pm -
When I think of the Express as was, it’s always Giles’ granny that sticks in the memory. I suppose she’s six feet under now. Mind you, she looked about 100 in the 70s.
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January 13, 2015 at 4:48 pm -
Granny has been six feet under since the death of her creator in1995.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Giles-
January 13, 2015 at 5:12 pm -
Interesting he should have worked for the Reynolds Weekly; I’d never even heard of it until today! I wonder when the paragraph of him ‘lusting after young women’s bottoms’ was inserted, though?
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January 13, 2015 at 5:26 pm -
“Used his celebrity status”?? Now where have we heard that one before??
I would be surprised if anyone even knew what he looked like. Maybe Dux and MWT are adding that to all celebrity wiki to drum up a bit of business. -
January 13, 2015 at 5:32 pm -
Giles – A Life In Cartoons.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0747278865/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1421170051&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX200_QL40
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January 13, 2015 at 11:33 am -
“the morning paper sticking through the letterbox is as rare a sight these days”
I still have The Bestes Frau In The World’s “Daily Fail” delivered to our door by child labour every morn because I would be embarrassed to have to buy it each morning in a shop full of people and then carry it home (no doubt having forgotten to take a large plastic bag with me). No I’m not joking, I’d rather people saw, say, The Sun or The Pink Un under my arm and assumed I was a fan of Page 3 tits or a screaming bender than that I was a Daily Mail reader!
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January 13, 2015 at 2:23 pm -
Apparently, ‘Mayfair’ and ‘Whitehouse’ used to be good cover for the Mail!
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January 13, 2015 at 5:17 pm -
Strangely enough the Mail proved rather good cover for Mayfair when I was confined to an old-fashioned NHS ward many years ago and wished not to embarrass the passing SRN’s.
I was given the Mayfair as a gift by some girl friends to take my mind off my pain and suffering. Little did they know the pain and suffering they were inflicting upon me by giving a porno mag to a bed-ridden young man confined in a public ward…
….. Women huh?… -
January 13, 2015 at 6:44 pm -
“Little did they know the pain and suffering they were inflicting upon me”
Ya think? Trust me, they knew full well and you should count yourself lucky you weren’t ‘in’ for a urinary tract infection, clap or a male torsion cos I reckon those nice young ladies would have brought you not just a porn mag but a portable DVD player, headphones and the entire Emmanuel Collector’s Edition in HD. Girls, especially female ‘friends’ can be wicked if they have a ‘captive’ audience…it’s the whole Amazon gene thing.
One of my sons had to have a circumcision at age 14…the AGONY his female ‘friends’ put him through was 1. pure evil and 2. highly amusing for me to watch his suffering. I recall the howls one morning when I sent two of his young lady friends up to his bedroom to awaken him a couple of days after the OP. Don’t think he has actually forgiven me for that one yet…..
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January 13, 2015 at 11:47 am -
As a keen paper-reader and former delivery-boy, I mourn the passing of the dead-tree press. Indeed, I learnt to read, as a curious pre-schooler, on my grandfather’s knee, using his Daily Express as the text-book – when the Daily Express was a proper broadsheet, obviously.
At its height, the national newpaper range offered a means to ‘grow up’, which I followed. You started at the tabloid end, gaining snippets and amusement, gradually progressing to the more serious papers, where breadth and depth of coverage added more vivid colour to the bare news framework elsewhere. Despite good schooling, I attribute most of my real-world education to a combination of quality newspapers and Radio4, both now in terminal decline.
Whilst the rise of on-line news certainly improves currency, it is so desperately difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, indeed to find any wheat at all, leading to a concern that following generations will not have the opportunity to grow their knowledge-base by an updated version of the route I enjoyed for decades. But the economics of printing and distributing simply don’t work any more and, coupled with younger generations quite unaccustomed to thinking beyond 140 characters, the quality of analysis and writing which we knew in newspapers only has a great future behind it. Progress eh ?
In practice, the best written analysis now is to be found on minority sites such as this which, along with its often erudite comments, can provoke, develop, inform, educate and entertain – those very valuable things which the quality press used to deliver for more of the masses.
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January 13, 2015 at 11:59 am -
“Or maybe the physical paper as a news source is already too far on its way to joining the Town Crier”
Another good article from the Pen Of Pet.
And to answer that question at the end, take a look at today’s Daily Hitler front page: http://www.thepaperboy.com/frontpages/archive/Daily_Mail_13_1_2015.jpg
Look at the use of space. How much space on the front cover does actual real ‘hard’ news take up? What takes pride of place? What is the thing that jumps out of the page? What is in colour and what not?
There’s your answer, right there.
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January 13, 2015 at 12:40 pm -
Interesting that the Belfast telegraph is saying “Kincora – Hope now fading for the truth”. The truth is presumably what the journalists want it to be, rather than what it is, and God forbid that they would want to write it. Mention above that Exaro are now in bed with the Mirror is quite chilling. I’d rather rely on Fox News.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:21 pm
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January 13, 2015 at 12:26 pm -
I was brought up with nearly all the newspapers to browse on a Saturday and Sunday. My paternal grandfather was a corner shop newsagent, who lived in the same street. My parents helped out at the weekends, and on Friday with local news delivery, and collecting money too for papers. A lot of papers have gone. The Herald. Reveille. Reynolds Weekly. The People etc. Not many people had The Times. The evening ones were Manchester Evening News and The Liverpool Echo. The N oW was called the scandal sheet and very popular. My grandparents got up very early to get rounds out for paper boys and girls. I was one of them. Because of evening papers it was a very long day. They had a rest between 3 to 5 pm. I was not able to judge journalistic standards…..too young, then otherwise engaged with homework. I remember at lot of stuff was very folksy and homely. Very polite and deferential too in a different era. Some parts of our village were rather posh and still are. Some rather grand houses still had the N o W but not The Times, maybe The Express. In the week we had The Mirror.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:19 pm -
Never heard of Reynolds Weekly, but the one daily tabloid I know disappeared was the Daily Sketch. I think it merged with the Mail in the early 70s, if I’m not mistaken.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:43 pm -
I have a distant memory that Reynolds News was owned by the Co-operative movement.
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January 13, 2015 at 12:28 pm -
But you’ve overlooked the primary purpose of the newspaper – completing the (Times) crossword whilst drinking a cup of tea. Or several.
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January 13, 2015 at 12:36 pm -
and there was me thinking that the primary purpose of the newspaper was lining the bottom of the raccoon cage…
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January 13, 2015 at 12:52 pm -
Try caging this blog’s raccoon!
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January 13, 2015 at 1:05 pm -
I’m sure Mr G has hand crafted a beautiful but secure wooden box or ‘house’ for this blog’s racoon…and it’ll have proper joints too…none of that ‘twisty catch’ MDF nonsense neither. It will also have finest absorbent saw dust for flooring…can’t expect a self respecting raccoon to wipe its bum on any old newspaper.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:17 pm
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January 13, 2015 at 12:58 pm -
“In ancient times, if we may believe the myths of Hellas, Athens, after a disastrous campaign, was compelled by her conqueror to send once every nine years a tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens.”
-Maiden Tribute W.T.Stead
Oh for the advantages of a classical education. Can you imagine any ‘loid these illiterate daze coming up with that opening line
in it’s SEARING INDEPTH REPORT FROM THE FRONTLINE OF EVIL UNDERAGE SEX SCANDAL + free titillation, INNIT ?-
January 13, 2015 at 2:16 pm -
I know Stead died on the Titanic. I wonder what a tabloid obituary would read like for him today? PAEDO JOURNO SINKS WITHOUT TRACE!
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January 13, 2015 at 3:05 pm -
I reckon it would read “PEDO JOURNO EU-FANBOY EVIL BLACK MAGICIAN WHITE SLAVE TRADER…”
…reading ‘Babylon’ in all its flowery pseudo-itellectual prose today does make me wonder why he was considered the leading reporter of his day (he apparently also founded the technique of the ‘Stitch Up’ -formerly known as ‘the interview’ and of making news not just reporting it).
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January 13, 2015 at 3:13 pm -
SLUMS MOURN STEAD
Old-Timers in Chicago’s Chinatown Remember English Author as “Billy, the Bum”
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/slums-mourn-stead-old-timers-in-chicagos-chinatown-remember.htmlFacts beat Fiction every time…
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January 13, 2015 at 1:50 pm -
Yes, all historically and intellectually rigorous and accurate. Stead and his polemic and crusade against child prostitution, all with the help of probably manufactured evidence, for example. The Victorian Press, especially, in and around London, I think, loved salacious stories about murder and every from of crime. They loved it, the public loved it and they bought it by the bucket load. Jack the Ripper was God’s gift to the Press!
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January 13, 2015 at 1:53 pm -
There’s a fortune waiting for the first person to perfect a bendy OLED newspaper-type digital thingy, that can also be rolled up and used to swat wasps, or wrapped around fish and chips.
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January 13, 2015 at 8:41 pm -
……. and finally torn into small squares and attached to a rusty nail in the outdoor bog as an absorbency and ink-retention challenge.
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January 13, 2015 at 9:44 pm -
Ah yes, that reminds me of a letter published in an Edinburgh student newspaper in days of yore, along the lines of:
“Dear Sir, I would like to compliment your on the excellence of your publication, the quality of its writers and the hard-hitting accuracy of its investigations. It is truly a compliment to journalism.
Yours etc.PS: Would you please ask the printers to change the ink they use, as the present one tends to stain the buttocks.”
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January 13, 2015 at 2:06 pm -
I happen to live in the road where I was the paper delivery boy some 50 years ago. It kept me fit, cycling uphill with a heavy bag full of newspapers. Back then, every house took at least one paper, mainly the Daily Mail or Express (it’s the poor end of town), but with a few Telegraphs too. Now, the few remaining recipients – 4 houses out of 50 – have their papers delivered by van.
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January 13, 2015 at 2:15 pm -
January 13, 2015 at 5:01 pm -
9 shillings a week I recall from the 1950’s for about an hour’s work 6 days a week. Saturday & Sunday collecting the money too, so it could take twice as long. Rain, snow, ice, still had to be done, 7.00am start. Just one Morning Star.
I recall a youth employment card from the local ministry of labour office or some such, without which it was illegal to do this work at 14.
I can see the shop now; L. G. Dormer’s, previously Miss Twitchett’s sweet shop, next to the post office in Northumberland Avenue. Gone now I guess.
Few deliveries around here & the parents drive the kids on their round.
45 pence.
And glad to have it.
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January 13, 2015 at 3:09 pm -
I haven’t bought a dead tree for years but for some reason did so, once, a while back. I was amazed how shallow it made TV news look; which, given the assembled throng’s view of dead tree, must tell you something about TV news!
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January 13, 2015 at 3:25 pm -
* I was amazed how shallow it made TV news look *
You need to upgrade to 3D and a curved screen mate
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January 13, 2015 at 4:12 pm -
My presence at the (first) Dave Lee Travis trial was a real eye-opener as far as witnessing the state of modern journalism, and I sat amongst them soaking up not just the trial but their professionalism.
All around 30 years old or younger save for a couple of older hacks who sat away from them.
The main scrum bantered with the prosecuting barrister beforehand who ‘joked’ she was watching what they tweeted of the trial.
For the most part they seemed completely uninterested in proceedings, taking every opportunity to talk amongst themselves about the Brit Awards, pop stars & vacuous celebrities. There was a young women with a skirt halfway up her arse who’s phone kept going off – she was there for one of the tabloids, not sure which. I heard two others ring HQ to ask ‘what should they put on Twitter?’
So if the Daily’s are sending disinterested interns to cover headline news, what level if skill will the ‘lesser’ stories warrant?-
January 13, 2015 at 4:20 pm -
I “followed” a journalist from The Times a while back. Presentation of the facts was clearly taking a back-seat to telling a story. In fact I’d go so far as to say he was blatantly telling a lie. That they get paid for it only makes them professional liarsI suppose.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/taxing-times.html-
January 19, 2015 at 6:20 am -
Well to be fair, that’s what journalists do. They tell stories. There has been a strand of trying to report facts as well in journalism, but that’s not the main job of it. It’s storytelling.
Humans are natural storytellers. It’s not just a pastime, it’s our innate way of imparting information- subjective, exaggerated and quite often invented, because the point of a story is to make a point (whether true or false) rather than report dry reality. That’s why we had to invent more cautious epistemologies (most notably, science) when reality matters. The problem is, this also means we are all suckers for stories. The more exciting they are, the more we want to believe them. So we’re at an emotional level never anywhere near sceptical enough.
The lurid tale of Jingle Jangle Jimmy is a prime example. It’s great storytelling. The facts just don’t matter.
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January 13, 2015 at 4:28 pm -
@ Chris ..A fascinating and valuable insight into how modern journalism actually functions. Can a man’s life and reputation have such little value and warrant so little respect?
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January 13, 2015 at 5:06 pm -
Disinterested interns are about all they are willing to employ. It also explains the Dickens dossier hysteria, because nobody employed at the papers has any idea of the history, they were at most in nursery at the time.
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January 13, 2015 at 4:28 pm -
Yes, the dear old Torygraph. It truly is dire. Used to read it every day, now it’s barely worth glancing at. I think Booker is one of the last really decent people they’ve got left. The rest seem unable to do more than regurgitate press releases and generate misleading sub headings.
Ah me. Even nostalgia’s not what it used to be. But don’t worry, it will be someday.
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January 13, 2015 at 4:40 pm -
Probably the last time a UK newspaper was worth the rag paper it was printed on: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/takingliberties/staritems/26blackdwarfpic.html
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January 13, 2015 at 5:05 pm -
The decline of the British press is described in “Flat Earth News” by Nick Davies.
It describes how the decline of Fleet street* started in the 1990’s, as the newspapers became to be owned by people and corporations who were interested solely in profit. Murdoch of course leading the way earlier than that. Thus dumbing down and cheap filler about celebrities etc etc all predates the rise of the internet as the information source; this was a deliberate decision, not the effect of an outside agency. Journalists are making up, sorry, submitting multiple times as many stories than they did 30 years ago not because they want to but because their bosses demand that they do so, hence the shallow dull stories because you can’t learn about a topic and provide background when you only have 30 mins to bash out a few hundred words.
If you’ve ever wondered why newspapers are all the same now it’s because they’ve sacked most of the journalists and get most of their filling from press releases (Hastily reworded or quoted by someone who has no knowledge of the topic in question) and the wire services.In fact I have a book which came from the Daily Mail library, it actually used to have its own library. That the book is “The Fatal Decisions”, about important turning points in the German conduct of WW2 is somewhat entertaining.
* Yes, okay, we know it’s always had a lot of crap, but there used to be some genuine good from it that actually outweighed that, nowadays it seems a lot harder to find any good at all, let alone weigh it against the nonsense.
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January 13, 2015 at 5:25 pm -
The man who told us in 1998 that there were at least a million paedophiles in the UK. He must be basking in the righteous glow of journalistic truth these days.
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January 13, 2015 at 7:19 pm -
The most interesting thing about the Stead story, the bit that made least apparent sense on first reading, is why on earth he was prosecuted for exposing such a scandal in the first place, and who might instigate that.
There are some obvious contenders, and having read a bit more, it would appear that much of it emanated from the work of rival newspapers, who must have been hurting from the Pall mall’s financial success , which exposed the methodology by which he created the story, and possibly also some politicians, who resented being shown up for what they had apparently failed to act on. Now isn’t that a surprise.
The big difference between then and now, though, is that rivals publications don’t seem to give a damn about the methodology or truth behind any exposure story , but will piggy back on it to make some cash too, and the politicians will spend any amount of money, time and effort to maintain the myth if they think that they can use it to further their moral busybodying, whether that is something that is really justifiable or not.
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January 19, 2015 at 6:16 am -
He was prosecuted because he didn’t “expose” anything; he abducted a girl himself, then wrote it up as if somebody else had done it. If he were interested in reportage, he’d have found a real case but, then as now, the real thing was rather thin on the ground. It was on behalf of the social purity movement who, desperate to prohibit prostitution and brothels, were already telling the tales of kidnapped waifs that we are having another round of at the moment.
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January 19, 2015 at 6:13 am -
A little too kind to Stead. Unable to find a real example of the moral panic that was to be immortalised as White Slavery (and these days, Sex Trafficking), he invented one himself. He told the mother that her daughter was going into respectable service. Which may seem strange to us, but in those days the young started work as soon as they were useful, rather than dawdling around until their mid 20s doing a History of Art degree, so it was basically the normal age to packed off into service, factory work, apprenticeship, etc.
….. Women huh?… 
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