Culture TabloidsTabloids developed their malodorous
reputation because of the gutter journalism
practiced by their earliest proponents in
Britain and the United States. It wasn’t until
after 1900 that the term tabloid, which
originally connoted a newspaper half the size
of a standard broadsheet (about the size of
today’s New York Times), became synonymous
with the lurid and scandalous. In 1919 two
cousins, Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert
Rutherford McCormick, began publishing
the New York Daily News. Its reduced, tabloid
size was immediately successful, being easier
to hold and read on New York’s sardine-
packed subways. The Daily Newswas assured
even greater circulation by its unbridled
preoccupation with sex and violence,
conveyed by screaming headlines and full
front-page halftones. It became the largest-
selling tabloid in America and spawned many competitors. One of these
was Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic, which entered into an
unprecedented circulation war, giving its readers the most reprehensible
displays of gutter publishing ever practiced. Despite, or because of this,
tabloid mania flourished in the 1920 s until loud outcries from the protectors
of the public’s morals tempered, somewhat, the rumor, sex, and gore.
Recently, there has been a more benign reason for publishing a
tabloid: economy. Printers could offer publishers twice the product for half
the price. For this reason a tabloid explosion began in the mid- 1960 s,
coinciding with the free-speech movement and subsequent rise of youth
culture. Low-budget underground or counterculture papers appeared
around the country and abroad. Anarchic drug, sex, and political weeklies,
like the San Francisco Oracle, the Los Angeles Free Press, and the East
Village Other, were in the vanguard of this movement. They were cheaply
produced, inexpensively sold (average twenty-five cents), and widely read.
They were records and totems of their times.
The tabloids’ design was governed by a marked lack of money and126