Page 72 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 61

Table 2.1 Readership of four national dailies by Social Grade

Source: National Readership Survey, 1989

not the same in content or utility for the Heavy Metal fan and the
devotee of Bach. The supposition must surely be that this is true of
newspapers, too.
In the case of Britain, the differences are particularly clear from the
readership of the papers themselves. If we look at the social profiles of
the readership of the most widely read and the least widely read of
British papers, we find that they are markedly different. Using the
widely available but unfortunately not very scientific measure of
‘Social Grade’ developed by the advertising industry, we get the figures
in Table 2.1. Social Grade is not Social Class in any precise sense, but
the figures clearly indicate that the readership of the two kinds of papers
is skewed towards different ends of the social scale. One sort of paper is
read disproportionately by a group clustering around manual workers,
the other by a group clustering around upper white-collar and
professional people. We may genuinely claim, I think, that these papers
have their homes in different social classes.
The modern press is produced for different social classes and it has to
be understood as part of the differing cultural lives of those classes. The
place and content of a newspaper in working-class culture is quite
different than in middle-class or ruling-class culture. The press in
general is not and never has been a single self-evident and
undifferentiated category. The ‘press’ is a portmanteau term which
includes a range of different artefacts produced by different sorts of
organizations for different reasons, which are consumed in different
ways at different times in history and in biography by different types
and numbers of people who derive different things from them. More or
less the only elements the varied things which we would want to put in