NRJ Book Reviews: Reading Tabloids: Tabloid Newspapers and Their Readers

Abstract

Sofia Johansson, Reading Tabloids: Tabloid Newspapers and Their Readers, (Huddinge, Sweden: Sodertornhogskola, 2007). 195 pages, paperback.Review by Steven HallockOne of chief drawbacks of Sofia Johansson's entertaining and informative analysis of tabloid journalism is found in concluding statements of her study, which is based on her PhD dissertation. Discussing polarization in academia concerning the intellectual traditions of social theory and cultural studies, she complains that there is little qualitative research into how readers understand newspapers, even though this medium has a prominent place in theories about democracy and public sphere. This observation rather summarily dismisses decades of research, qualitative and quantitative analyses that do include anecdotal and narrative elements and that have been published in media and communications journals, periodicals and books.But more to point, author offers her study as a qualitative breakthrough in analysis of British tabloids, specifically Sun and Daily Mirror, when it actually is little more than anecdotal musings posing as qualitative research. This outcome stems from some basic flaws in her method, termed dialogic by author, that range from lack of random selection and a tiny sampling pool of focus groups and arbitrarily chosen interview subjects-she claims 55 readers overall-to a questionable process of determining publication time frames. While she claims to eschew quantitative method, she read a year's worth of both newspapers, from November 2002 to November 2003, with no apparent comparative format of common days or dates other than a representative week in November 2003-and with no explanation of why that month was chosen. This suggests that author used at least a partially quantitative method, which she calls textual analysis, but which resembles standard content analysis. Yet she apparently avoids formal coding, thus making replication and verification impossible.To her credit, Johansson makes no claim of generalization of her findings. She said she simply wanted to discern reader attitudes about and reactions to tabloid reportage aimed at a working-class audience and to use information obtained from questionnaire-guided focus groups and group interviews to offer some social and, at times, psychological commentary about them. Therefore, she terms her research in defining her purpose in introduction. She asks of tabloids, Why are they popular? What do readers make of them? As popular tabloids contribute to lives of over 15 million British newspaper readers, I am convinced that in order to get answers to these questions, readers need to be acknowledged as active producers of meaning. This book seeks to do so through presenting exploratory research with readers of tabloid newspapers.Beyond that, Johansson offers no explanation of why this research is important to field. While she draws on relevant theory such as uses and gratification and encoding-decoding, she ignores in her social science-laden literature review important media theory that deals with newspaper-reader relationships such as gatekeeping, schema, framing, perception and agenda-setting.The book does, however, have value. This value is found in nitty-gritty snatches of dialogue that Johansson shares with her readers, sections in which interview and focus group respondents acknowledge their political naivete in context of their social and economic class standing, discuss their enjoyment of sports and celebrity coverage, and their ambivalence about Sun's notorious Page 3 female nudity. …