The Proud Tower, 1900

Barbara Tuchman, the American author and historian, titled her ‘Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914’ The Proud Tower after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Tuchman explored a possible myth, a post-war construct of an Edwardian golden age in which innocents blessed by a century of progress failed to foresee the horror of what was coming. She surveyed the idea that there were pent-up problems, elusive and lethal forces not properly understood until it was too late. As Poe wrote in City of the Sea, ‘While from a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down’ (Poe 2003).

While Tuchman investigated that myth, she also conceded that after a century in which the power of machines had been harnessed to the advancement of industry and culture there was indeed, as she writes in her foreword, if not ‘a lovely sunset haze of peace and security’ at least some confidence in the early twentieth century about the potential of yet more benign power being built on those foundations.

It is atop a proud tower of their own that we find newspaper publishers at around the same point in time. By 1900 they were gazing over a landscape onto which, it seemed, endless opportunities for production, distribution, profit and power rolled out into the new century. Looking back more a hundred years later, they might have been shocked by the reality of subsequent decades of deepening attrition against forces of which they could not previously have dreamed, and over which they failed to establish control.

The period of our study starts there, in 1900, with the launch of probably the world's first tabloid newspaper, and ends with the launch of Snapchat in 2011.

The tabloid in this case was a British invention, and burst upon the world on the first day of the new century in a discourse of optimism about the shape of the emerging world for publishers and readers as well as the rest of a blessed mankind. This tabloid was the invention of Alfred Harmsworth, the County Dublin-born British upstart pioneer of mass-market popular journalism, who had launched the Daily Mail in 1896.