Imagining the Mass-market Woman Reader: The News of the World, 1843–77

Abstract

When Rupert Murdoch appointed Rebekah Brooks editor of the News of the World (NOTW) in 2000, one of her first projects was to initiate the sensational ‘For Sarah’ campaign, which published photos of paedophiles living in local neighbourhoods. The series sparked public outrage, raising the profile of the paper and boosting its flagging circulation.¹ After Brooks became the first female editor of the Sun in 2003 and CEO of News International in 2009, it seemed that the so-called ‘feminisation’ of the British press had finally been realised. Beginning in the 1990s, British media critics argued that the press was becoming increasingly ‘feminine’ by focusing on publishing personal and confessional content and defining women as the primary producers and consumers of popular print.² Today, press historians trace the roots of this ‘feminisation’ much further back in time — to the end of the nineteenth century, when newspapers associated with the New Journalism began incorporating interviews, investigative journalism, human-interest stories and women’s pages in an attempt to reach out to a mass reading audience.³ In this chapter, I would like to suggest that the construction of the mass-market woman reader begins even earlier, with the Sunday newspapers founded in the 1840s. Using the NOTW as a case study, I will demonstrate how these papers imagined women as a key constituency in the market for popular journalism.