Introduction

When the 35-year-old Anglo-Irish businessman Alfred Harmsworth was invited by American press magnate Joseph Pulitzer to guest edit a special edition of the World for one day only, on 1 January 1901, he used the term ‘tabloid’– initially trademarked by a pill manufacturer as a combination of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’– to describe the newspaper of the future: a small, easily digested news pill. In an event held as a New Year's party, with staff working throughout the night in evening dress, he instructed reporters to keep paragraphs and sentences as short as possible, and for stories not to exceed 250 words. When the paper appeared in the morning, it had, to the shock and curiosity of its readers, been reduced to half the standard broadsheet size, with a one-page editorial headline ‘All the News in Sixty Seconds’, boasting: ‘The World enters today upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.’

Although this edition of the World sold out quickly, the experiment was met with suspicion from journalists and the public, and it would take some time before it was repeated in full. However, it is often cited as an example of journalistic innovation, and it provides a pertinent illustration of how ‘tabloid’, even early on, demarked a style of journalism that entailed a strong emphasis on transience and plainness (Pound and Harmsworth 1959: 265–8; Tulloch 2000: 131–2; Bingham and Conboy 2015: 1).

Sometimes referred to solely as a compact newspaper format– about half the size of a broadsheet– ‘ tabloid’ equally connotes a particular type of journalism: populist, condensed, accessible and brash, and often boundary-pushing and provocative. Over the course of the twentieth century, this particular type of popular journalism was epitomised by certain British newspapers, with the leading London titles providing millions of readers with their daily portion of news, amusement and titillation, at times achieving some of the biggest circulations in the world.