Page 74 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 63

artefact. Such a perspective allows us to start to make sense of what
these papers contain and why they are so popular in ways that an
analysis which begins from a comparison with the serious and political
middle- and upper-class press does not. We can, at the very least, take
these extremely important cultural phenomena as objects of study in
their own right rather than as exemplars of the lamentable debasement of
popular taste compared with that shown by intellectuals.
An adequate grasp of the different kinds of cultural artefacts which lurk
within what looks like a plain simple newspaper illuminates an
important feature both of press history and some contemporary
newspaper projects. There have long been attempts to construct a mass-
circulation popular newspaper based upon the primacy of the political
content. The detailed history of the life, as opposed to the death, of the
most important British example of this, the Daily Herald, remains to be
written, but it is clear that the acquisition of the title by Odhams
represented a shift away from what had been until then a working-class
political paper in the narrow sense we have been discussing above. This
early version of the paper had been closely tied first to trade-union
struggles and then to the Labour Party, but it remained a relatively
small-circulation paper. As a left Labour paper under Lansbury it had a
chequered history and even under the much more moderate official
leadership of the TUC its circulation remained around 500,000. The
development of its circulation in the 1930s does not appear to have been
the result of the ‘serious’ content of the paper: one ex-editor argued that
the sharp rise in circulation was the result of ‘every sort of circulation
stunt’. 16
What is more, there was even in its high period a perceived conflict
between the serious and the popular elements of its content. Another ex-
editor, Francis Williams, wrote that:

To be its editor…was, I found, no easy task; particularly if one
was, as I was, more interested in serious news and its significance
than in bright headlines or display and wanted the paper to be the
mirror of intelligent cultural movements into the bargain. 17
Williams found himself engaged in a continual struggle between the
publishers and the party. Odhams were prepared to honour their pledge
to keep the Daily Herald a Labour Party paper and to devote considerable
space to publicizing the views of the Labour and Trade Union
leadership, but they were also a commercial concern who had devoted
very considerable resources to gaining a mass circulation and they