The Media and the Road to Modernity | 79illustrated family weeklies that tended to avoid politics in the narrower sense.
The Illustrated London News (1842), the Paris L’Illustration (1843) and the
Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung (1843) not only appeared at the same time and with
similar names, but the German magazine had copied the format and often
even used the pictures and articles of the other weeklies as well. Drawings were
often based on photographs, as printed photographs were only made possible
by technical advances at the beginning of the 1880s, and were not regularly
found in illustrated magazines or newspaper supplements until the end of the
1890s. In this respect one can speak of a rapid upsurge of visualisation even
before 1900 that familiarised people with distant lands, local court cases, and
society personages (Weise 1989).
Some of the key traits of the popular press in the waning nineteenth century
- besides high circulation and low cost – were their local frames of reference,
their sports reporting, their accounts of sensations (accidents, crimes, etc.) and
the large amount of advertising they contained. Nevertheless, national differ-
ences and frequent fluid transitions to different formats are unmistakeable.
Thus the new mass press was not always apolitical or only interested in the
pursuit of sensational news items or topics of local interest. This was partic-
ularly true of early American prototypes of this format, and also the Parisian
Petit Journal that had initially eschewed political themes in order to avoid the
press tax (Thogmartin 1998: 63f.). Beginning with the 1860s, many other
countries had similar papers, like the Folkets Dagblad in Denmark, established
in 1863 (Hoyer, in Broersma 2007: 42).
However, researchers have often been too hasty in projecting impressions
of today’s popular press onto newspapers of that time like the Daily Mail, Pall
Mall Gazette and BZ am Mittag. These were not yet dominated by sensation-
alist headlines, but rather by contemporary domestic and foreign policy, with
sports, local news and entertainment gaining in importance. Since these papers
were especially well furnished with editors and correspondents, they can also
be seen as precursors of today’s serious journalism. The Anglo-Saxon ‘popular
press’ in particular set new benchmarks with its critical investigative journal-
ism. Furthermore, all newspapers showed a recognisable trend away from the
former dominance of foreign policy articles and towards more reporting on
domestic policy, regional news and cultural themes (Wilke 1986). Neverthe-
less, politics in the narrower sense was seldom found in high-circulation pic-
torial papers like the Illustrated London News, the Gartenlaube or the Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung, which primarily collected interesting, curious and enter-
taining topics from all over the world. Yet here too, lines were blurred: for
example, the illustrated weekly Reynolds’s Newspaper continually seized upon
both the spectacular and the political.
By the same token, the new mass press was not always neutral. Papers
of this kind often began with the avowed intention of remaining aloof from