80 | Mass Media and Historical Change
single parties so as to be able to address a broad readership. In actual fact
they often strayed from this course and followed the political persuasions of
their owners. In this way the initially apolitical Petit Journal moved into the
Nationalist-Conservative camp after a change of ownership. Just as the papers
of the major British editor Lord Northcliffe, such as the Daily Mail, favoured
the Conservatives, the German Berliner Lokalanzeiger and the illustrated Die
Woche, from the publishing house Scherl, also took a conservative course and
supported the Kaiser. Here again the boundary with the party-affiliated press
was blurred, although the popular press retained greater political flexibility.
The boundaries between financing and marketing were likewise fluid.
The assumption that it was primarily the new mass press that was financed
by advertising does not stand up to general scrutiny. In Great Britain, where
classifieds were already more entrenched, advertisements accounted for more
than half the space in classical newspapers like The Times and the Manchester
Guardian, and consistently adorned their front pages (Brown 1985: 16). Simi-
larly, the advertising columns of Germany’s party and opinion press were often
even more extensive than those in the popular Berlin papers, taking up more
than half the space (Requate 1995: 363f.). The notion of the popular press as
a ‘centre of corruption’ was rather an offspring of contemporary cultural criti-
cism. Indeed, the French partisan press in particular was especially vulnerable
to corrupt influence because it used hardly any advertising to finance itself.
The popular press likewise professionalised the job of journalist, which
until the 1850s had served mainly as a transitional or second job for writers,
professors and politicians. It was not until the last third of the nineteenth
century that journalism became a permanent full-time profession worldwide.
As is always the case with new professions, journalists now began organising
themselves in groups that could give voice to their interests (Requate 1995:
222–42). By 1900, journalism was developing culturally into a field that
embodied the ambivalence of modernity like hardly any other. A mixture of
social advancement and job insecurity, a new sense of power and gnawing self-
doubt, elitist consciousness and popular culture characterised both journalism
and the fin de siècle.
Studies distinguish between two separate journalistic templates that
remained the defining models until the end of the twentieth century: on the
one hand the news-oriented investigative Anglo-Saxon journalism, and on
the other the opinion-oriented, party-affiliated journalism of the European
continent (Requate 1995; Esser 1998). These two journalistic cultures have
been somewhat sweepingly described by German scholars as ‘track hounds and
Missionaries’ (Renate Köcher) or ‘News and Views’. In Anglo-Saxon coun-
tries journalists have, since the 1850s, proclaimed the press to be a ‘Fourth
Force’ next to politics. Anglo-Saxon newspapers, publishers and journalists
continued to favour certain parties, it is true, yet the profession enjoyed greater