Tabloidization in the Internet age

Abstract

The public interest function of the press underscores the ‘information-orientation’ role of newspapers, whereby ‘quality’ journalism serves to inform citizens, enabling their meaningful participation in democratic societies. While claims regarding a spreading of tabloid journalistic values are not new, dating back to the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, such claims have proliferated with the rise and widespread use of the Internet. These allegations abound, particularly in the UK, largely in view of the tabloid’s historical and continued popularity in this national context. The relevant scholarship, however, consists of anecdotal evidence and statements supported by intuition rather than empirical data. This chapter assesses a possible ‘tabloidization’ of newspapers through a longitudinal, quantitative linguistic approach. The journalistic values depicted by the research literature as traditionally characteristic of tabloids, namely sensationalism and personalization, and those depicted as traditionally distinctive of ‘quality’ newspapers, namely ‘information-orientation,’ are operationalized linguistically, with changes in the frequencies of the linguistic markers of each examined between 1968 and 2016. Evaluation of a possible ‘tabloidization’ of British newspapers is important to help us understand the impact of the Internet on journalism and the public sphere more broadly.