Tabloidization of news

The tabloid phenomenon can be read as both a sign of critical and professional anxiety about finding a media audience without substantial loss to a sophisticated political democracy, and a product of that anxiety when converted, in the media industry, to systematic attempts to connect with audiences by all available means. The many current pressures on newspapers are both cause and effect of the signs of tabloidization, or may be unrelated to it. For example, technological changes, such as the digitization of photography and the enhancements to colour occasioned by new printing infrastructure, encouraged the use of more visual material. Making newspapers more visibly appealing counters competition from other media with an audio-visual capacity, especially television, and increasingly the Internet, which can speedily deliver textual, photographic and moving news images and messages. At the same time, sober, worthy forms of television -sometimes lampooned as 'radio with pictures' -might be enlivened without a necessary loss to the quality and function of news provision and analysis. Such an approach may be denounced as tabloidization, or seen as a necessary adjustment to the presentation of the news media by adapting to the perceived needs and demands of new audiences less wedded to traditional news media consumption patterns. While commercial media organizations have obvious economic interests, neither private nor public media can preserve or enhance democracy if financially unviable and/or ignored by audiences. As Sparks (2000: 35) observes, 'The social composition and patterns of life of the news audiences in advanced societies is changing. There is a perceived crisis in representative democracy marked by low participation rates and declining party membership'. Under these circumstances, what is described as tabloidization can also be interpreted as part of a search for 'the right sort of news mix for commercial success' (p. 36) and, among public media, for the legitimacy conferred by relevance to their citizen audiences (Born, 2005). The power of media organizations to set their own agenda should not be exaggerated. For example, the fluctuations in levels of advertising in the principal news pages in the newspapers sampled above may have been caused not by publisher -editor deliberations, but by a weakening of the advertising market occasioned by external circumstances (a drift to other media, an economic recession, or, as in the case of 2002, the 'post 9/11' climate of business pessimism). Similarly, changes in government have profound implications for media organizations funded or regulated by the state -that is, virtually all of them. Yet the power of the popular tabloid press in the political sphere cannot be underestimated -as the case of the UK's Sun during the years of the Thatcher Government in the late twentieth century conspicuously reveals (Chippindale and Horrie, 1992). Debates about tabloidization of the news media, therefore, are always about media power and the responsibilities of journalism -both to enhance and to degrade democracy in making diurnal choices about the rendering of the world.