Tabloids: Stolen From The British?

Gossip is a vice of many, a guilty pleasure, if you will. Tabloids became a means of spreading gossip or sensational stories that could be spread like wildfires. 

The earliest tabloids available on the internet record being discovered from the regency area. 1796's latest juicy tabloid was in the form of scandal sheets like The Female Tatler or illustrations. One such illustration was by James Gillray of the prince regent caught in bed with Lady Jersey, aka a civilian from the colonies. 

In another image, a long line of royalty is mocked by characters from 1819. 

You might be asking, what is a tabloid? The word tabloid comes from the name the London-based pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. gave to the compress tablets they marketed as "Tabloid" pills in the late 1880s. This definition was then applied to other small compressed items, such as tabloid forms of the news. Thus, Tabloid Journalism was born in 1901, which initially stood for a paper that condensed stories into a simplified, easily absorbed format. These new Tabloid papers would allow news companies to reach further down in social classes, making reading and receiving news easier for people who could not afford an entire paper or read the striking articles by seasoned professionals. 

After the plague of yellow journalism, sensationalism, and crude exaggerations of the truth, tabloid journalism officially took over in the 1900s to continue sensationalism with a rebrand. This type of journalism has a more practical definition aside from it's strictly gossip. Two forms of tabloid writing emerged: compact and red-top tabloid journalism. 

Compact journalism describes the physicality of newspapers that use an editorial style more associated with broadsheet newspapers. This term was coined to distinguish the smaller format of newsprint from the scandalous tabloids in the 1900s. 

In stark contrast, red top journalism describes a form of journalism closely associated with the British & Commonwealth's usage to have their mastheads printed in red ink as an eye-grabber compared to the black and white letters, marginally more significant than the rest of the paper. They utilized a straightforward vernacular while prioritizing pictures over word count. These papers were often accused of strictly following social newsworthy events with a political bias. 

In 1903 Alfred Harmsworth started the first modern tabloid, The Daily Mirror, in London. Its first publication would be distributed on November 2nd, 1903. This reduced, easier-to-read paper appealed to the mass market as it presented crime stories, human tragedies, celebrity gossip, sports, comics, and puzzles. Is there anything acceptable to talk about at the dinner table? The Daily Sketch and the Daily Graphic employed Harmsworth's concept. 

In 1900, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, invited Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northciffe), founder of the Daily Mail in London, to edit the World for one day. Harmsworth's imaginative version of the World, which came out on January 1st, 1901, was half the size of the paper's customary format and was heralded as the "newspaper of the 20th century." 

Of the American tabloids, the New York Daily News was the first successful one. This publication, begun in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, changed its name to Daily News a few months later. By 1930, its circulation had risen to 1,520,000, reaching 2 million in the next decade. This tabloid emphasized political wrongdoings, including much devotion to photography. 

In today's day, both The Daily Mirror and the New York Daily News employ publishing techniques discovered over a hundred years ago, which illustrate how people's consumption needs for gossip and juicy tabloids will forever be a vice, a guilty pleasure if you will.