Tabloid Tales

The increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as 'tabloidization.' The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just 'dumbing down' or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit.

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Introduction: The Panic over Tabloid News
Part 3 Part One: Are the Tabloids Taking Over?
Chapter 4 1 Political Space and the Trade in Television News
Chapter 5 2 Does Tabloidization Make German Local Newspapers Successful?
Chapter 6 3 Tabloidization in the British Press: A Quantitative Investigation into Changes in British Newspapers, 1952-1997
Chapter 7 4 Thirty Years of Competition in the British Tabloid Press: TheMirror and theSun, 1968-1998
Chapter 8 5 The Development of the Tabloid Press in Hungary
Part 9 Part Two: Tabloid Journalism in Perspective
Chapter 10 6 The Eternal Recurrence of New Journalism
Chapter 11 7 The Home and Family Section in the Japanese Newspaper
Chapter 12 8 Talking about the Tabloids: Journalists' Views
Chapter 13 9 Tabloidized Political Coverage in the GermanBild-Zeitung
Chapter 14 10 Tabloidization, Media Panics, and Mad Cow Disease
Part 15 Part Three: What Implications Does Tabloid Journalism Have for Society?
Chapter 16 11 Audience Demands in a Murderous Market: Tabloidization of U.S. Television News
Chapter 17 12 Literacy, Seriousness, and the Oprah Winfrey Book Club
Chapter 18 13 Rethinking Personalization in Current Affairs Journalism
Chapter 19 14La Nota Roja: Popular Journalism and the Transition to Democracy in Mexico
Chapter 20 15 Tabloidization, Popular Journalism, and Democracy