Page 77 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

66 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

provision of information about private interests. If that division retains
any validity, it no longer corresponds even approximately to the
conventional division between newspapers and magazines. From every
point of view it seems sensible to adopt a more catholic definition of
journalism and of the scope of the press. This is not simply a question
of tidying our mental universe by altering the margins of our definitions
but more importantly of recognizing one of the fundamental
contemporary realities of the press and the actual dynamic of its
development.
The number of newspapers in the UK has been falling over the
century: while there has recently been a small reversal in the number of
national papers, the development of the entirely advertising-financed
‘free sheet’ has meant either the end of a large number of local papers
or their transformation into products virtually identical with the free
sheet. The 1977 Royal Commission on the Press estimated there were
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just over 1,000 local weekly newspapers and some 150 free sheets. In
1986, the Newspaper Society (a trade organization representing the
publishers of local newspapers), estimated there were 850 local
weeklies and 850 free sheets, of which 350 belonged to their own
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members. Overall, the rate of growth is very quick indeed.
The consequence of these shifts, other things being equal, should be a
decline in the number of journalists, since even if the total number of
titles were to remain the same or to rise, the free sheet tends to employ
fewer journalists than the traditional local newspaper. In fact, the
evidence is that the reverse is true: there are more and more people
thinking of themselves as journalists. This would be more or less
inexplicable except for the fact that the number of magazines is
certainly increasing rather rapidly and has been doing so for a very long
time. The balance within journalism is clearly away from newspaper
employment and towards the magazine sector.
At least some of the magazine journalists are, of course, engaged in
news reporting every bit as much as someone working for a newspaper,
but this is often not directed at a general public but a closed and
specialized group of people who get information about matters very
remote from the concerns of public life which the press is claimed to
address. Within the total output of the press, including both newspapers
and magazines, the historical trend is towards an erosion of those
products concerned primarily with issues of the public sphere. The two
areas of growth, as Table 2.2 shows, are publications aimed at particular
occupational niches and those aimed at particular leisure niches. The
‘address’ of the press is less and less to the general public in its role as