Abstract
The debate over the condition and prospects of the periodical press has been with us in one shape or form throughout the present century and for much of the latter half of the last. With each new technical and organisational development, fresh doubts have been cast over the future of the established press. The style and vigour of the New Journalism, for example, admirable enough in its way, was nevertheless seen to transform journalists and newspapers into ‘“complete machines” … lacking creativity and initiative’.1 And yet few observers of the press would doubt that, whatever else, in the longer term, the New Journalism placed the periodical press on a surer footing than hitherto.
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Notes
‘The Lament of a Leader Writer’ quoted in ‘How New was the New Journalism?’ in Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (New York, 1988) p. 58. See also Laurel Brake, ‘The Old Journalism and the New: Forms of Cultural Production in London in the 1880s’, in Wiener (ed.) Papers for the Millions, pp. 1–24.
Albert Cave, ‘The Newest Journalism’, Contemporary Review, XCI (1907) 18–32. See also L. Courtney, ‘The Making and Reading of Newspapers’, Contemporary Review, LXXIX (1901) 365–76.
There is a prodigious literature, most obviously in journals and periodicals, dealing with the current and likely impact of electronic technology on the press. A useful starting point is Anthony Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s (Oxford, 1980). But see also Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York, 1980); Gary Gumpert, Talking Tombstones and Other Tales of the Media Age (Oxford, 1987); Thomas L. McPhail, Electronic Colonialism, 2nd edn (Bury St Edmunds, 1987); D. Patten, Newspapers and New Media (New York, 1986). Even before the enormous technical advances of the 1980s, commentators were beginning to prophesy a dramatic change in communications; see, for example, F.W. Lancaster, Towards Paperless Information Systems (New York, 1978).
One of the most interesting experiments in electronic publishing was conducted by Professor Brian Shackel and his colleagues at Loughborough University. B. Shackel and D.J. Pullinger, BLEND 1: Background and Developments (London, 1984). H.-J. Bullinger et al. (eds), Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT 87: Proceedings of the Second IFIP Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (Amsterdam, 1987).
See, for example, B. Shackel et al., BLENDS-5: The Computer Human Factors Journal (London, 1986). For some general observations about the impact of these processes on specialist academic publishing see Deian Hopkin, ‘Historical Journals and New technology’, in Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Stuttgart, 1985 (Paris, 1987).
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© 1990 Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, Lionel Madden
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Hopkin, D. (1990). Technology and the Periodical Press. In: Brake, L., Jones, A., Madden, L. (eds) Investigating Victorian Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20790-9_14
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