Page 78 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 67

Table 2.2 UK publications categorized by focus of main content

Notes: Public=publications addressing wholly or mainly issues of the public
sphere.
General=publications addressing a variety of questions.
Work=publications addressing a particular occupation.
Leisure=publications addressing a particular leisure activity.
Source: Willing’s Press Directory

citizen and more and more to the individual defined as a particular
specialized occupational or interest group. While there may be an
epistemological identity between a report of parliament in a newspaper
and a report of a fashion show in a clothes magazine, it is extremely
hard to see them as activities having a similar social import for their
readers, and more journalists, then, are directly concerned with
entertainment or specialized information provision rather than the
general political and social functions which have traditionally been
ascribed to them.
The developments we have identified have been present for a
considerable period of time. The development of an entertainment-
based working-class newspaper press is more than a century and a half
old. The decline of the newspaper press relative to the magazine press is
at least fifty years old. The shift in the balance of journalism away from
the production of serious material towards entertainment is certainly not
a new phenomenon. There is little evidence of a sharp qualitative break
between two distinct epochs in press history. To the extent that ideas
about a ‘new media age’ give us any special purchase on these
developments in the media today it seems to me that we can identify
three trends which are usually taken as characteristic of the period and
which impact upon our subject.
The first and most obvious is the internationalization of economic life
and the concomitant internationalization of news production. The old
claims made for the ‘serious’ press were, I have argued, closely bound
up with the claims of bourgeois democracy and thus of the nation-state