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The Culture of Newspapers:
The Slow Birth of the Modern Newspaper in Australia, 1890-1940
Peter Dowling
The culture of newspapers for a given time period can be many things.
It can refer to the editorial positions of different papers, their range
of contents - politics, international news, women's affairs, sport, society
gossip - and the style and character of the visual images that they include.
Before any of these dimensions to newspapers can be discussed, however,
I would argue that the first consideration in any study of the culture
of newspapers is to think of the newspaper as an artefact. In this context,
the crucial factors in the physical appearance of a newspaper are printing
technology, regularity of issue, distribution and advertising. The half-century
of 1890-1940 was one of great change relative to these factors and in effect,
the period gave birth to the modern newspaper as we know it today.
The scale of this change is best seen by comparing a pre-World War I
daily broadsheet, characterised by its long columns of tightly packed print,
with a post-World War I tabloid paper's numerous reproductions of photographs.
The editorial page from the Age newspaper of Saturday 12 January
1900 denoted the leading article for the day by the use of the Age
masthead. And while the Age had no illustrations itself at the turn
of the century, this Saturday paper, in a column block headlined 'The Leader',
gave a list of illustrations to be found in its weekly stablemate publication
of that name. Forty years later, the appearance of the Age had not
changed a great deal. The front page of 5 January 1940 shows advertisements
as opposed to articles, but the layout is still dominated by long columns
of compressed type. The only outward change in appearance is the inclusion
of two blocks in the top right corner, one, spanning three columns and
set in larger type, announcing the headlines and the other, spanning two
columns, containing an index to the paper.
In contrast, the front page of the Sun News-Pictorial of 13 September
1922, a paper launched earlier the same month, was covered with photographs.
The inside pages of the Sun were a mix of text and imagery.
The purpose of this paper, is to chart the roles played by the aforementioned
factors in accounting for this dramatic change in the appearance of newspapers
during the 1890-1940 period. I should qualify the ambitious nature of this
paper by stating that it will only be looking at Melbourne and Sydney newspapers
from the beginning of each decade. This decade by decade sampling will
also provide the basis for judgements made about trends in the appearance
of newspapers so please do not expect too much chronological preciseness
concerning the date of their introduction relative to different papers.
At the same time, it will become evident that the relevant factors were
of just as much significance for other capital city papers, provincial
city papers and even the tri-weekly papers of country towns.
Beginning with the regularity of issue factor, in 1890 there were three
distinct newspaper forms: the daily broadsheet, the weekly rural paper
and the monthly illustrated paper. (See Appendix for a list of the leading
Melbourne and Sydney papers in each of these three categories.) In Melbourne,
the Age was the daily paper, the Leader its weekly counterpart
and the Illustrated Australian News its monthly counterpart. In
Sydney, the Sydney Morning Herald was the daily and the Sydney
Mail its weekly stablemate. The independent Illustrated Sydney News
was the monthly illustrated paper for the colony.
There were two key reasons for this tripartite arrangement to the publishing
of newspapers in Australia at the beginning of the period under survey:
technical limitations with regard to printing technology; and the difficulties
of distribution deriving from the tyranny of distance.
The printing of newspapers was inhibited by both the composition of
the text and the production of images. At the text level, the high cost
and slow pace of manual composition meant that the size of even the largest
daily newspapers was restricted from a logistical point of view to eight
pages. This explains the long, tightly composed columns of print that characterised
newspapers from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, since
every effort was made to pack in as much type per unit of space as possible.
In contrast to the eight-page daily newspaper, was the sixty-page weekly
newspaper. The reason why this greater size could be achieved was the longer
time frame available for the composition of type.
The issues of high cost and slow pace also affected the production of
images. As a result, the daily newspaper was rarely, if ever, illustrated,
since the engraving of a standard size 20 x 25 centimetre woodblock for
an illustrated newspaper took one engraver approximately a week to complete,
far too long for the sketch or photograph of an event to be reproduced
in a daily paper the following day. In colonial Australia, the principal
reason why illustrated newspapers were published monthly rather than weekly,
as occurred with the Illustrated London News in England and Harpers
Weekly in America, was that the costs involved meant that the early,
independently owned, papers published in the 1850s were never financially
viable. Firstly, Australia's population at the time of the gold rushes
was too small. Secondly, the papers were conceived with an English audience
in mind as much as a colonial audience, yet weekly issue was not particularly
suited to the monthly mail service to England. Only with the change to
monthly issue in the 1860s were colonial illustrated newspapers to be successful.
With regards to distribution, the circulation of the capital city dailies
beyond the cities themselves presented difficulties due to the distances
involved and the limited development of railways and coastal shipping.
However, the growth of population in country towns over the course of the
second half of the nineteenth century, especially with the development
of agriculture, had encouraged the capital city dailies to try and tap
this potential rural audience by publishing weekly papers. Most were launched
in the 1860s. The weeklies combined the roles of being a summary of the
week's news, a journal of advice for farmers and a magazine of light reading.
At the same time, the weekly paper also tried to meet the needs of the
urban reader, especially those of the working class who could not always
afford to buy a daily paper. This targeted audience of both rural and urban
readers helps to explain why the Sydney Mail, in its literary role,
was successful in serialising Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms
in 1880-82.
It was relative to this tripartite arrangement of city dailies, rural
weeklies and illustrated monthlies that the 1890s were to be a watershed
with the advent of two new printing technologies; the linotype machine
and photomechanical half-tone process, both having been developed in the
United States in the 1880s-early 1890s. In terms of composition of type,
the linotype machine facilitated reduced costs, more pages per issue and
increased circulation. The half-tone process allowed for the inclusion
into the daily newspaper of photographs that had been taken the previous
day, as opposed to waiting a week for them to be engraved.
Given that the means for publishing daily newspapers illustrated with
photographs were now available, it was not long before someone seized upon
the possibilities to produce the newspaper as it essentially appears today.
Before the turn of the century, W. Randolph Hearst in America had revolutionised
journalism with his introduction of banner headlines, the lavish inclusion
of illustrations and other methods directed at invoking a sensationalist
approach to the news. His new approach was imitated in England by Lord
Northcliffe. The tabloid press had arrived.
In Australia, meanwhile, in August 1888, the Illustrated Sydney News
became the first Australian paper to reproduce a photograph using the new
half-tone process. The slow and expensive wood engraving process was obsolete.
Within eight years, all the illustrated papers had folded, their role having
been taken over by the weeklies which had begun to be illustrated in the
1870s, albeit somewhat sparsely. As for the daily broadsheets, even though
the half-tone process meant that it was possible for them to be illustrated,
it was not until World War I that they first began to publish occasional
photographs. The main reason for their reluctance to take advantage of
the new technology was that it was considered beneath the dignity of a
broadsheet to include pictures.
The technological transition to the new half-tone and linotype processes
necessitated a considerable outlay of capital on the part of newspaper
companies. It is in this context that we come to the fourth and final factor
that affected change in the appearance of newspapers, this being the rise
of brand-name advertising, a trend that was destined to become one of the
hallmarks of the twentieth century's consumer culture. By 1900, throughout
the industrialised world, advertising agencies working on the behalf of
manufacturers were realising that the wide circulation and ready acceptance
into the home of the newspaper made it an ideal vehicle for the promotion
of products carrying a brand-name.
In this context, it is pertinent that R.B. Walker, in Yesterday's
News, a history of the New South Wales press during the 1920s and 1930s,
has calculated that in 1938, only 28 per cent of advertising in newspapers
was given over to 'national' advertising of brand-named goods. The other
72 per cent consisted of 'local' advertising such as classified, retail
and entertainment advertising. This is mentioned because it has sometimes
been argued in the context of the American press that the rise of brand-name
advertising helped newspaper companies to underwrite the costs of introducing
the new linotype and half-tone technologies. Yet in the case of Australian
newspapers, the fact that brand-name advertising only accounted for roughly
one-quarter of advertising revenue meant that it was hardly going to be
a major factor in covering the costs of introducing the new printing technologies.
An alternative is to argue that the rise of the new technologies meant
that daily newspapers, given their increased size and expanded circulation,
were able to facilitate a significant rise in local advertising as well
as taking advantage of the advent of brand-name advertising.
In Australia, in the years before World War I, it was the weekly rural
paper which led the way in taking advantage of the new printing technologies.
A double-page spread in the Sydney Mail of 12 January 1910 (pp.22-23),
for instance, show two advertisements on the left and a news photograph
of Lord Kitchener on the right. The photograph of Lord Kitchener points
to the greatest problem with the half-tone process in the late nineteenth-early
twentieth century, namely that it did not reproduce the tonal contrasts
of the original photograph very effectively. As a result, photographs in
newspapers often had a dull grey look. One solution to this problem was
the practise of touching up the original photograph in order to sharpen
the contrasts in tone before it was reproduced as a half-tone.
Two alternative approaches to the problem of reproducing photographs
are shown by the advertisements. One in a Penfold's wine advertisement,
also a half tone, reproduces a monochrome gouache sketch rather than a
photograph. No doubt produced by an early advertising agency, the commercial
artist responsible for producing the original sketch would have known to
sharpen the tonal contrasts in the image so as to avoid the dull greyness
that characterised the reproduced photograph. Underneath this advertisement,
an advertisement for Bechstein pianos could easily be mistaken for an Art
Nouveau style woodcut. Rather, the original was a drawing executed in this
style and reproduced by the lineblock process, another photomechanical
process that reproduced black-and-white images more cheaply than the half-tone
process. There can be no doubting the far superior graphic qualities of
the two advertisements, despite the different media used for producing
the original image and the different image reproduction methods, compared
with the photograph of Lord Kitchener.
It comes as a surprise, though, that a double-page from a 1922 issue
of the Sun News-Pictorial, could date from just a little over a
decade after this Sydney Mail example. In terms of layout, the Sun
pages of 13 September 1922 (pp.20-21), show the familiar mix of news photographs,
columns of type and full page advertisements that we associate with the
appearance of the modern newspaper.
It was a trend, however, that was resisted by the daily broadsheets.
A page from the Age of 9 January 1930 (p.9), shows that photographs
were usually used only to illustrate events deemed particularly newsworthy,
in this case a plane crash. Before World War II, it was not uncommon for
several consecutive daily issues of the Age and the Sydney Morning
Herald to be without photographs.
Not until World War II did the broadsheets begin to imitate some of
the features of the tabloid press. It was during this time that the daily
broadsheets first began to use banner headlines on page one, instead of
reserving the front page for advertising, which, as we have seen, was still
the case in 1940. At the same time, the broadsheets also began to produce
page layouts which combined photographs, columns of text and block advertisements
similar in style to pages of the Sun News-Pictorial in 1922. Indeed,
a Velvet Soap advertisement from the Age of 5 January 1940 combines
a photograph of a housewife with items of manchester drawn by a commercial
artist. The combining of the two mediums, along with a voice bubble, served
to give greater visual interest to the advertisement.
Although there were no further changes in printing technology during
the interwar period, there was a substantial change in the means of distribution,
given the advent of the motor-car. At the same time, the spread of Australia's
rail network reached its peak during this period. As the circulation of
daily papers that could include photographs of events from the previous
day expanded, rural-dwelling people were no longer so reliant on the weekly
paper for their news. Also needing to be factored into the changing reading
habits of Australians was the introduction of both radio and the cinema
news-reel. There was a general demand for, and an ability to provide, the
news faster. Not surprisingly, a number of the illustrated weeklies folded
during the interwar period. The Australian Town and Country Journal
closed in 1919 and the Sydney Mail in 1938. On the other hand, of
the three Victorian weeklies, the Australasian and the Leader
did not close until 1946 and 1957 respectively and the Weekly Times
is still running.
This paper has sought to give a brief overview of the reasons for the
changes in the appearance of the Australian daily newspaper over the 1890-1940
period. On the one hand, it considers how changes in regularity of issue,
printing technology, distribution and advertising were crucial to the two-phase
collapse of the tripartite arrangement of city dailies, rural weeklies
and monthly illustrated newspapers. The first phase, beginning after the
last monthly illustrated newspaper folded in 1896, was the two-tier arrangement
of non-illustrated city dailies and illustrated weekly papers. By 1940,
this arrangement had further collapsed to more or less leave just the city
and rural distributed, daily illustrated newspaper. On the other hand,
the paper looks at changes in the appearance of the daily newspaper that
were concomitant with the collapse of the tripartite arrangement to newspaper
publication. In effect, by 1940, the daily newspaper had the roles of the
city daily, rural weekly and monthly illustrated paper all in one.
Peter Dowling
9 Eastfield Road
Ringwood East Vic 3135
APPENDIX
DAILY BROADSHEETS
Herald, 1840-1990 (Evening paper after 1869).
Argus, 1846-1957.
Age, 1854-.
Sydney Morning Herald, 1831-.
DAILY TABLOIDS
Sun-Herald, 1922-, (Previously Sun News-Pictorial).
Daily Telegraph, 1879-, (Changed to tabloid 1936).
Sun, 1910-, (Sydney evening paper).
WEEKLY RURAL PAPERS
Leader, 1856-1957 (Pub. by Age).
Australasian, 1864-1946 (Pub. by Argus).
Weekly Times, 1869- (Pub. by Herald).
Sydney Mail, 1860-1938 (Pub. by Sydney Morning Herald).
Australian Town and Country Journal, 1870-1919 (Pub. by Sydney Evening
News, 1867-1931).
MONTHLY ILLUSTRATED PAPERS
Illustrated Australian News, 1862-96 (Pub. by Age)
Australasian Sketcher, 1873-89, (Pub. by Argus).
Illustrated Sydney News, 1864-94, (Pub. independently).
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Last Updated : 29 September 1998