The Media and the Road to Modernity | 83typesetters were viewed as probable candidates for mental hospitals (Radkau
1998: 242).
Like the news criers, the great newspaper offices were landmarks of the
metropolis, uniting editorial offices and production under one roof. Newspa-
per districts like Fleet Street in London and Koch Straße in Berlin apparently
presented a mighty counterpoint to government districts. People often gath-
ered in front of the big news buildings, eager to get the first copies as quickly
as possible because they were interested in the classified ads. But there were
also many visitors to the editorial rooms, since newspaper office hours were
published in the masthead. People came to report news, display artworks and
seek advice.
Pioneering studies have shown that this interaction between the press and
the citizens was also helpful in the fight against crime. The young popular press
publicised spectacular murders that shook the city and sometimes the entire
world. The new mass publication The Star became hugely successful with its
articles about Jack the Ripper’s murders of prostitutes. Its critical reporting
in turn had repercussions for the police investigation, finally contributing to
the resignation of the Chief of Police. With their endless reports about such
murders, newspapers also shaped people’s views of society. They uncovered
urban poverty and prostitution, and offered interpretations – from the Marxist
class struggle to feminist points (Walkowitz 1994: 191–220; Curtis 2001;
Hett 2004: 57). Police and newspapers enlisted readers’ aid in the pursuit of
criminals by asking them to help to find witnesses and perpetrators (Müller
2005). News reports about spectacular trials furnished new insights into the
underworld and questioned the legitimacy of judicial actions. As Benjamin
Hett has argued, two-class justice disappeared in the light of public scrutiny
(Hett 2004: 222).
Press photographs often bolstered this socially critical reading of the
metropolis. The very first printed photos in newspaper history, published by
Stephen H. Horgan in the New York Daily Graphic in 1880, depicted slum
housing in New York. The documentary photos of Jacob A. Riis that appeared
in newspapers in 1888/89 served to enduringly raise New Yorkers’ awareness
of the slums in their own city (Emery and Emery 1988: 225). While investi-
gating, journalists acted as ‘urban spectators’, exploring the metropolis as if it
were a ‘dark continent’ (Walkowitz 1994: 33). The reporters from the Berliner
Illustrirten Zeitung visited unusual locations like prisons, the ‘madhouse’ and
warming halls, or simply wrote about ‘Berlin by Night’. The British star jour-
nalist William Thomas Stead conversed incognito with pimps and prostitutes
in London’s East End in 1885 to better enable him to describe their lives. He
even personally initiated the purported purchase of a thirteen-year-old girl.
His investigative report about ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in the
Pall Mall Gazette strongly influenced the notion that in the midst of London