Journalism Studies

ISSN: 1461-670X (Print) 1469-9699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20

PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

Martin Conboy
To cite this article: Martin Conboy (2007) PERMEATION AND PROFUSION, Journalism Studies,
8:1, 1-12, DOI: 10.1080/14616700601056775
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616700601056775

Published online: 16 Feb 2007.

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GUEST EDITORS INTRODUCTION

PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

Popular journalism in the new millennium

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Martin Conboy

Journalism is living through interesting times. Formats are changing, audiences

fragmenting, the exchanges between quality and tabloid are accelerating. There is a
burgeoning set of debates both within the industry and the academy, not to mention
among the citizens or consumers themselves about what sort of journalism we are being
presented with in the early years of this new millennium. Popular journalism in particular is
crossing boundaries and multiplying its output in a process of permeation and profusion.
From the perspective of panic-mongers, what they refer to as tabloidization seems to
threaten the fabric of social and political representation, as we know it. From the
perspective of the consumer of popular journalism there has never been so much to
choose from and never previously has there been such a determination to prioritize what
the people want. It seems appropriate to reconsider the pace and content of popular
journalism in 2007 at the start of a new millennium since journalism as a popular form was
very much at the heart of developments in both political culture and leisure for much of
the previous millennium.
So many broader discussions of popular culture are written as if such culture was
exclusively of the moment and predominantly to do with youth culture. There is much to
be gained by considering longer-term views of popular culture especially when dealing
with journalism. Historical perspective can alert us to the fact that complaints about the
quality of popular journalism or reminiscences of declines in standards since a previous
golden age are not accurate reflections of the complexities of journalisms appeal over
time (Tulloch, 2000). Historical perspective also demonstrates that journalism has always
been part of a general process of making information accessible to people outside the
narrow confines of power-elites and gossip-mongers. Earliest periodicals in the 17th
century included claims to be addressed to the People in their titles. Radical newspapers
in the 19th century claimed power for the people, the Daily Mirror from the 1940s adopted
the slogan Forward With The People and today ratings-chasing news programmes
celebrate an affinity with the viewer-as-people. What unites all of these different addresses
to the people is an ability to frame the appeal within a language, a rhetoric which
encapsulates not only the world view but also the very language of those people (Conboy,
2002).
For readers unfamiliar with the debates specific to journalism and its relationship to
popular culture, there is clearly a need for a brief synopsis of the main points of reference.
This is not merely turf arranging. It is an attempt to outline the terms of debate so that the
various contributions in this volume can be appreciated in the light of the ongoing
traditions of discussion on this subject. We will start with certain key definitions of
popular. These definitions illustrate why debates about the role and quality of popular
journalism are so hotly contested. Raymond Williams (1976, p. 19) claims that there are
three areas of conflict around the term popular which create complexity around the
term and the variety of its products. It can be seen, first, politically as denoting culture
Journalism Studies, Vol. 8, No 1, 2007
ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online/07/010001-12
2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14616700601056775

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MARTIN CONBOY

created from the point of view of the people rather than those seeking power over them;
second, it can be seen as inferior to the quality of elite or high cultural products and
practices; third, it can mean well-liked by many people. Sparks (2000) has distilled these
into the political, the aesthetic and the quantitative aspects of the popular. In our
contemporary capitalist consumer culture, it is hard to envisage much in the way of
journalism which is produced entirely by ordinary people and consumed by sufficient
numbers of them to maintain regular production as journalism given the institutional and
financial demands of the genre. Fiske (1994) has always maintained that these contradictory factors had to be interpreted in the light of a further conflict between the interests
of the people and the interests of the power-bloc and it is this dynamic which gives
popular journalism its political dimension.
Ultimately, it is the way in which these issues are negotiated for the benefit of
ordinary people which lends any popular journalism its political importance. Whether
popular journalism leans more towards information or entertainment, the cultural
discourse of popular involvement in both of these aspects is of similar importance as
both are ways of enabling ordinary people to discover and discuss the affairs of the
contemporary world beyond their immediate, personal experience. In her recent plea for
the re-reading of popular culture, Hermes has argued that, the political value of popular
culture is to be found in its contribution to citizenship. Essentially citizenship *in the
sense of individuals and social groups commitment to the common good (or public
interest) is the basis and the prerequisite for a functioning democratic system (2005,
p. 158) but she stresses that such a form of citizenship, should be defined as sets (plural)
of practices that constitute individuals as competent members of sets of different and
sometimes overlapping communities . . . (2005, p. 159).
Technologically, and demographically, we are seeing more seepage between once
distinct genres in our cultures and journalism is no exception to this trend. Previously
convenient distinctions between elite and popular culture often no longer apply. Under
pressures from increased capitalization and technological innovation we have seen the
beginnings of professional convergence within journalism and following this trend we are
quite possibly seeing a corresponding popular convergence in which previously distinct
aspects of popular journalism blend and mix with other genres the better to fulfil its
purpose of making money and claiming influence by articulating the interests and the
voice of the people. The process of popularization can be considered to be shifting
dramatically under the influence of new technologies which give more scope for multimedia involvement and selectivity. The people are being called from every side. The
people themselves may not be the producers of the popular media they consume
including popular journalism so the popular is not purely of the people but increasingly
the people are compiling eclectic patterns of media consumption in a way which reflects
their identity much more than when popular culture was synonymous with mass culture.
There is an increase in popular forms, a migration of popular rhetoric into elite forms of
journalism and most significantly more involvement in the construction of a diverse
discourse of the popular in a multi-media environment.
This issue presents a variety of forms of popular journalism from different national,
technological and demographic contexts. The advantage of this wide spectrum is that it
demonstrates that popular culture is permeating cultural and generic areas as never
before yet often retains very specific national characteristics. Historically, Peter Burke has
traced popular cultures affinity with narrow and parochial views of local communities

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PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

which have disadvantaged both insiders and outsiders to those communities (1978, p. 50).
Popular journalism as a particular variant of popular culture can often lead to a
parochialism which is most unhelpful in broadening social and cultural awareness beyond
the narrow confines of a narrowly perceived insider category (Conboy, 2006). However,
there are trends triggered by technological developments and patterns of media
consumption across sections of global youth culture (some of which dealt with by
Costera Meijer, in particular, in this issue), which indicate that this unappealing aspect of
popular culture might be withering.
Reworking the words of Carl Bernstein, Allan has asserted that all journalism is
popular journalism or at least aspires to be at some level (1999, p. 193). Dahlgren (1992)
has provocatively insisted that journalism has to be considered as part of cultural studies
and not as some sort of professional terrarium which is immune to the influences of the
popular environment outside. There is significant evidence to support both of these
suppositions. Some of the earliest print publications drew upon the name of the people
in order to legitimize their publication and also to differentiate the interests of such
publications from official publications. Technologically, the development of printing in
16th-century Europe enabled communication channels to diversify and to diversify at a
profit. This diversification needed to be seen as addressing the interests of a wider social
and political circle from the privileged minority who had previously held a monopoly on
information.
As journalism developed, it did so in a series of enlarging circles, moving out from
the general ambition to inform people of what was happening of significance in their
world. Developments in the grand narratives of liberal journalism were always related to
the interests of the ordinary people often doubling up as the politically informed and
therefore empowered citizen (Hampton, 2004). The great leaps in the scope and scale of
journalism in the 19th century were driven by capital investment but they drew upon the
desires of an increasingly politicized readership for their market. Calls to the people
became the clarion of the popular press of the 19th century and by the end of that century
even the elite press had bought into at least a selectively liberal version of that rhetoric
(Curran, 1978). Campbell (2000, p. 40) has observed that the very coining of the word
journalism in the English language came in response to the challenges of a specific form
of communication which blended aspects of high political culture with popular culture in
ways hitherto not experienced in British society.
Popular journalism has always been one of the areas within social communication
which tells us most about the dynamics of contemporary life. It tells us about the tastes of
the masses as the products of popular culture attempt to shape and match their
expectations and desires for profit; if they are successful in this, they survive. It tells us
about the ways in which the ordinary people are articulated as readers in the highly
idealized constructions of the audience design (Bell, 1984) of popular journalism.
We need to consider through exploration of a range of contemporary journalism
forms which can be described for a variety of reasons as popular, whether they are
fitting within the forces of late capitalism described by Tetzlaff (1991) or are in their own
ways providing spaces to resist those forces. In other words are these forms of popular
journalism simply integrating consumers into patterns of capitalist consumption or do
they offer real possibilities of involvement and reflection upon the contemporary? More
interestingly, we might consider a more dialogic approach which considers the ways in
which all forms of contemporary journalism need to be able to develop strategies of

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MARTIN CONBOY

popularization which allow them to maintain some form of authentic claim to represent
the opinions and lifestyles of a broad section of the people, aimed as they are at generalist
markets and all in need of a certain amount of commercial success to be able to continue.
What we have, in the range of popular journalism presented in this volume, is
indicative of the possibilities which open up when one seeks to produce analysis of both
producers and of consumers of popular journalism. Hermes writes of the shared
pleasures (2005, p. 155) of popular culture and certainly one of the shared aspects of
popular journalism is that it is directed implicitly at a wide audience, one which shares a
particular sense of solidarity with regard to the everyday based on assumed contingency
of tastes, generational identity, ethnicity, political persuasion. It is the pleasurable basis
which forms as much a part of that community as its informational component and in fact
in most forms of journalism, especially popular forms; it was ever thus. Consumer culture
and the spaces of the popular are becoming increasingly intertwined and co-dependent. It
seems churlish to imagine, even more so than when Williams was exploring the issue of
popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s, that we can disentangle them for the purposes of
providing some form of analysis which would postulate a pure popular space. That
space does not exist but it does not prevent us from exploring the complexities of popular
culture as it permeates our journalism. Along with Hermes, we must insist that there is a
democratic imperative to re-read popular culture (2005, p. 159) and to consider the part
which popular journalism plays within it. Contemporary popular journalism illustrates a
great deal about contemporary forms of civic engagement within formats which inscribe a
sense of community into its texts as part of its social and commercial appeal. It is that
community which is as important an expression of the popular as the economic compact
between audience and medium.
To consider fully the potential of popular journalism we need to move beyond
narrow technological considerations and also to move beyond the traditional home of
popular culture: the nation state. Increasingly, examples of popular journalism are
emerging which cast a new light on discussions of the impact of journalism on new
audiences, beyond traditional generational and ethnic boundaries. In terms of genre, we
have to consider the impact of a wider range of styles as they impact for better or for
worse on the quality and quantity of public communication channels. We need to consider
the prescient words of Anthony Smith (1978) writing when the Internet was not even a
speck on the horizon. He wrote that journalists were continuing to work with notions of
truth that had become seriously challenged by other perceptions within science and
philosophy for the best part of a century. The Internet adds impetus to imperatives for
journalists to reconsider how the norms and truth-claims of their product can maintain a
distinctive place in the media ecology against competing ethical claims from alternative
producers divested of institutional or political pressures, claiming to have the interests of
the people, as consumers of information, more directly at heart.
In order to pursue more clearly the common themes within the contributions, I have
taken the liberty of grouping them into three sub-sections which I hope will assist the
reader in appreciating the coherence across the pieces. Ogunyemi, Matheson and Tulloch
are all in their various ways considering questions of popular voice in relation to
demographic shifts, across comparative historical eras or as counterpoised to the voice
of the producers. Singer, Costera Meijer and Mano pose questions about the nature of
contemporary popular journalism which force us to reconsider the fundamental claims of
journalism itself to truth and whether it alone has a monopoly on political intervention in

PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

the public sphere as technological and social circumstances shift. Nice and Rssland both
in their different ways consider aspects of popular journalisms repressed or abject dark
side and how incorporation of sex, crime and sensation have assisted in popular
journalisms quest for respectability.

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Enacting and Resisting the Voice of the People

Ogunyemis contribution is a timely call to reconsider the diversifying tendencies
based not on the technological shifts impacting upon journalism but on the increasingly
varied needs of a globally dispersed popular audience: the African diaspora. Popular
journalism appears to have less to do with the massification of cultural product despite
commercial pressures to maximize audiences which still exist and more to do with
strategic alignments to very specific popular markets. As part of this process the mass is
becoming fragmented by the experience of different world views determined, in part, by
global diasporic shifts. The very title of the publication which Ogunyemi chooses for his
study is redolent of many of the debates around the key feature of popular journalism. In
the African Voice , the aim is to provide a commercially viable conduit for the concerns and
aspirations of a particular community and to communicate with that community in its own
idealized voice, attempting to provide the contours and identity which can give a
diaspora an authentic sense of their new shared community. This newspaper attempts to
provide a network of shared allegiances on behalf of the interests of the ordinary members
of this scattered community which takes us beyond the traditional imperatives of
providing an imagined community based on the psycho-geography of the nation state
and instead attempts to have this diaspora identifying around a common world view
dependent on its shared experience both of origin and of separation. It is very much a
postmodern popular community which the newspaper attempts to address in its
sensitivity to the recombination of fragmented identities.
The African Voice is popular in conventional terms because it is widely read by its
targeted readership and therefore financially successful. Furthermore, it is popular in its
ability to develop a pragmatic understanding of its readership and in its ability to talk to
that readership in terms of its everyday experiences. The extended interview with the
editor demonstrates the ways in which this pragmatism is combined into a successful
journalistic and commercial product, one built on a profound understanding of a range of
African cultural identities. Its popularity outside the confines of the mainstream white
news media also make it an alternative voice and demonstrate how such ventures can
provide niche responses to the homogenizing tendencies present in other forms
of popular journalism. It is very much an alternative medium which provides a style of
popular journalism which rejects the populist tendencies of the mainstream and navigates
a pragmatic course between the long-term financial need for a stable audience as well as
grasping the shifting cultural complexity of its readers shared experience of belonging in
the third cultural space of diasporic hybridity (Bhabha, 1994). This form of journalism is
very much a specialized variety of the popular and provides a product which while not
belonging to the people themselves does manage to articulate an authentic sense of
community.
As a contrast to much of the emphasis on the rhetoric of the people in popular
journalism, Matheson examines how the people are referred to in the writings of
established figures in the world of New Zealand journalism. His study is based on the

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MARTIN CONBOY

meta-texts of memoir, biography and interview rather than on the texts of journalism itself
but provide a particular insight into the nationally specific contexts of a variety of
journalism which appears to exclude the people from much of its deliberations. It is an
interesting reflection on what appears to happen to any form of journalism which
attempts to delete the people from the rhetoric. The absence of concern for the people
themselves as a political constituency weakens what Matheson considers is one of the
central tenets of journalism: its discourse of popular legitimacy. He argues that journalism
as a discourse needs popular legitimacy at its very heart if it is to flourish and provide the
communicative impact which journalism needs to retain credibility as a social and political
force. The linkage between popular legitimacy and politics demonstrates that the popular
is not simply an additional extra for journalism but one of its core commitments. This
paper helps both to extend the geographical range of the discussion but also gives us
another intriguing insight into the variety within the discourses of contemporary popular
journalism around the globe. Certainly the popular does not seem on this sample to be in
any danger of homogenizing tendencies. There is plenty of diversity in its practices. Eliding
the people as actors or even in the rhetoric of the press demonstrates what is at stake if
the professionalization of journalism detaches it from concerns with the popular and the
politics associated with it. Matheson attempts to separate out the popular from the
populist in exploring the political imperatives of a journalism which addresses the real
concerns of the ordinary people rather than acting as the embodiment of establishment
voices including the highly professionalized and unrepresentative cadre of New Zealand
journalists themselves who appear to have little taste for popular involvement. As he says,
one of the absolutely central points of journalism is to find a credible means of expressing
the relationship between news media and their audiences. He considers that the popular
is one of the key channels for resolving the tensions at the heart of commercial journalism
which can be seen as directly related to the tripartite definition of the popular in Williams
(1976). Popular connections to real people are in Mathesons view absolutely necessary if
we are to avoid a news service for consumers deracinated from the everyday concerns of
popular politics. Popular rhetoric is absent, as too are the people themselves, in the
examples he provides and when they are represented in the newspapers these people are
presented as devoid of political context or in the stereotypical contexts of sport or a lack of
high culture. He sees popular journalism, a journalism which engages in the political
complexities of readers lives and which attempts to address the people in terms of their
own experience of everyday life, as constituting a potential third alternative between
tabloid and quality journalism but he claims that in their marginalization of the people
from their meta-discourse about journalism the journalists he focuses on are in turn
marginalizing journalisms political legitimacy.
Tullochs piece explicitly addresses a set of continuities within one of the enduring
institutions of British popular journalism, the Daily Mirror . It would be fair to say that this
newspaper provides one of the longest perspectives on the maintenance of a popular
voice over time. Tullochs study is compelling because it begins to reassess by close textual
reference at two key moments in British history how the content of that popular voice and
its political resonances have changed, not simply over time but within the changing
contours of the institutions with which popular newspapers have to do business
politically. To this end, the piece reconsiders whether we can ascribe anything as
consistent as a character to a popular newspaper. It is, of course, the extent to which the
rhetoric of the people matches the everyday experiences of those same people over time

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PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

which consolidates any popular journalisms credibility. He contrasts the ways in which the
newspaper, under two very different editors and in two very different political eras,
engaged on a popular level with the topic of military adventurism. To those who assume
that commercial popular newspapers have always tended towards a rather automatic
patriotism in times of military crisis, this is a corrective view. It looks at the ways in which a
newspaper can orchestrate its repertoire of populist textual strategies to draw in a popular
community of readers on to its side as part of a longer-term articulation of identity. It is a
carefully circumscribed but very potent example of intertextual media engagement
drawing on campaigns, editorially themed letters, cartoons and petitions all designed to
amplify the rhetoric of popular resistance to the policies of the power bloc. Despite all of
this, the major flaw from a popular perspective, in Tullochs view, is the absence of real
people. The rhetoric has really begun to trump the real and even when the people are
allowed their say it is in terms of the categories which tend towards a stereotypical view of
the people as opposed to their rich rhetorical composition. The differences are mapped on
to the shifts in political engagement between 1956 and 2003. Tulloch argues that the shift
in the Daily Mirror s association with the formal political power brokers makes the popular
rhetoric more hollow today than in 1956 when a wider range of public political institutions
could be orchestrated along with the popular reader and through this allow the popular
reader a fuller perspective and location in the wider political debate. In the contemporary
Daily Mirror , the readers were very much a passive part of a range of rhetorical strategies.
The newspaper has become much more self-enclosed, much more reliant on the
sophistication of its rhetoric than on the actual engagement of its readers in broader
political life. Yet the Daily Mirror can still be used as a useful barometer of political shifts
within the rhetoric of popular journalism.

Technological and Generic Shifts

Singer considers the important question of how blogging as a popular form of
communication is having an influence on a range of norms and values which journalism
has long held for its own. This is clearly part of a process of erosion at work between the
popular and the professional as those outside the institutional parameters of journalism
begin to demand a stake in the communication and definition of the newsworthy. The
emergence of the blogger continues to cast a questioning shadow over the place of
journalists as watchdogs, as the bloggers themselves appear to propose, through their
activities, that journalists and their institutionalized form of communication now
constitute part of the power bloc as opposed to a component of the resistance to it
which liberal versions of the heroic role of journalism down the ages would have us
believe. The flow between media forms, both discursively and technologically, is
increasing the intensity of exchange and blurring distinctions between journalism and
other forms of public communication. Blogging is a concrete manifestation of one of the
media transitions with most impact on the potential quality and interaction in public
communication. The Internet creates interconnected consumers and participants in a new
mediasphere which still can draw on the tensions present in discussions of popular culture
in general. It is for journalists themselves to define their new relationship with blogging
and to stake a claim to specific attributes which a technologically enhanced product can
contribute to a wired public sphere which includes empowered communicators with
access as never before to sources of information and networks of contact. Questions

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MARTIN CONBOY

abound within this new form of popular communication concerning the multi-valency of
truth, the potentially open-endedness of journalism as a product, the relationship between
popular communicators and privileged professionals, and whether this will become a
contestation or sharing of information and whether the blogosphere constitutes a rebirth
of public political communication. Blogging may force a reconsideration of de-bedding
rather than em-bedding as the guarantor of the popular credibility of journalism as
journalists are forced to get out of friendly beds in order to maintain their independence
and reliability away from the hot breath of their sources.
The sense of belonging to a community which young consumers of news media
articulate as a key requirement in their experience of journalism, in the research of Costera
Meijer, is very much a component of broader popular cultural patterns. As she points out,
young consumers have much to tell us about emerging trends as they are the vanguard in
experiencing and using this world of new media technologies. Such an exploration gives
one hope that we can move beyond retro-nostalgic for lost paradises of public
communication and facile assumptions that the new generation is receiving a dumbeddown version of what was once available for their parents generation. Such research goes
some way to ascertaining what is really going on in this particularly formative area of
popular journalism. It is a forum in which journalism has to match the expectations of a
wider community of media-savvy cultural consumers who are well aware of the cultural
discourse in which all journalism now competes for purposes of social understanding. This
sense of belonging, of using news as one means among many of identifying peer-groups
for exchange of information about the world, is very much a part of their attempt to use a
wide range of media messages, including but not privileging news, to find a sense of
understanding within a whirling social and political world which often seems on the point
of fragmenting beyond coherence. New media technologies may threaten coherence but
they also paradoxically offer hope of a multi-discursive, multi-media construct of social
community with a greater degree of negotiation on the part of the young consumers and
a greater sense of applicability to the complexities of the world they are experiencing. In
this world, journalism is not demarcated as distinct from many other forms of information
flow but makes sense to the extent that it fits within a diverse set of mediated and unmediated social experiences.
Popularity also implies a level of participation. This is one aspect of the popular
which is often neglected by producers of popular journalism who assume the mere market
transaction of buying a particular product is participation enough. This has led to the
rhetorical bond often standing in for real participation in popular dialogue with popular
products. The multiple ways that the young people in this survey use their media,
however, lead us to believe that there is a level of everyday participation which goes
beyond simple patterns of mere consumption. The implicit community of traditional
popular print and broadcast news becomes for them technologically transformed into an
explicit community of communication on the range of information consumed between
social actors exchanging live conversation, mobile or text conversations. The popular,
shared spaces of modern technology become exchanges of information helping the
participants to find and maintain an identity in these flows.
The responses of the participants show both levels of sophistication and ambiguity
towards the news they consume. They are aware of the need for information to be
distinguished from the entertainment forms in which it is often packaged and yet they are
also aware of the need to be able to connect emotionally and not simply rationally with

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PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

world events if they are to develop any sense of empathy with people whose communities
differ in their contours in some ways from their own. Multi-cultural societies have multidimensional popular news which can only be consumed or accessed partially. The
respondents also demonstrate an awareness that quality news needs to learn from the
generic patterns of popular media if it is to have as full an impact as possible. They are
themselves already selecting from a wide range of menus to create a composite media
world which can be cross-checked for relevance and reference with peers who are also
intensively involved in this popular, everyday multi-perspectival media world. This research
challenges any assumptions about the homogeneity of the popular public sphere and
shows how a new generation are working towards participation in which popular
journalism is increasingly one important part, and only one part, of sense-making
strategies in that world and a part which as with the other complementary strategies
entails a great degree of inter-peer communication and assertive individualism a million
miles away from older notions of the popular as mass culture.
One of the results of the technologically driven shifts in the patterns of popular
journalism has been that there has been an increase in the generic variety of journalism
and an extension in what can count as fulfilling or complementing traditional forms of
journalism, especially at the level of the popular. We may recall the ways in which ballads
and broadsides were once channels for the communication of news and gossip over
several centuries before popular print was available on a regular basis for large workingclass readerships. Ballads and broadsides provided both a visual and aural opportunity for
a popular form of mediated public commentary on contemporary events across much of
early modern Europe. Popular songs can also be seen as fitting into a longer oral tradition,
a tradition on to which early news based its patterns of communication. What is
fascinating in the Mano contribution is the way in which, in the particular social and
political conditions of contemporary Zimbabwe, popular music has been able to
appropriate certain traditional aspects of journalisms functions on behalf of the people
at a time when the liberal freedoms of journalism have been displaced by authoritarian
control. The piece builds around the first articulation in a song of the frustrations of a
people deprived of a popular political outlet for their concerns: Tozvireva Kupikos Where
can we report it? The music maps on to certain aspects of the definition of popular
culture as it articulates the aspirations and concerns of ordinary people and not a political
or commercial elite which would prefer this voice to be silenced as it is within mainstream
news media. Popular music may not be journalism but in this context it is clearly
managing to retain aspects of a campaigning and dissenting popular voice which belongs
well within the generic boundaries of journalisms own wider ambitions. While Mano
recognizes the limits of his metaphorical association of popular music and popular
journalism he nevertheless prompts us to consider, as others in this special issue, the
generic transformations across news formats which contemporary shifts in technology
have enabled. Making sense of the world by discussion of a wider spectrum of
contemporary popular media is at the very least a complementary aspect to popular
journalism and one which genuinely allows the oppressed to fight back against the
oppressors. Furthermore, this generic elasticity has been exploited by popular newspapers
in Zimbabwe, as Mano points out, to provide a form of subtle and surrogate political
commentary. Because of the vitality of contemporary popular journalism, located within a
vibrant and expanding popular culture, we need interdisciplinary models to help us
explore the connections between ordinary peoples experiences of everyday life and the

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MARTIN CONBOY

various and interdependent media which they use to make sense of and communicate this
further among their cultural peers. Manos is a bold and assertive argument which begs we
reconsider the connections between popular media particularly in situations where
political debate in the mainstream media is suppressed. To this end, he provides a
stimulating discussion of scholarship which draws together popular music and popular
politics in Africa. Not content with simply providing a commentary on the contemporary,
Mano gives us a historical context which helps us to understand the longer tradition into
which such song fits as a popular form of communication and shows how it has
contributed a series of narratives of popular struggles and their suppression to such effect
that the songs and their performers have become touchstones of reference in popular
newspapers attempting to give longer contexts to these narratives on behalf of their
readers who will know the songs but need reminding of the historical context. This is part
of an overtly didactic popular journalism attempting to teach a version of history to its
community of readers.
Oliver Mtukudzi is quoted as saying: I am just like a journalist. Indeed this piece
overall asks us to reflect upon what the function of the journalist is within a popular
journalism. If it is defined in terms of service to the people, as a commitment to truth and
an ethical engagement both within the parameters of popular politics and against an
authoritarian power bloc then regardless of the medium chosen, the product comes close
to the characteristic ambitions and functions of genuinely popular journalism.

Responsibility and Readers: Popular Journalism as Professionalization

One of the many benefits of a survey of trends around the theme of popular
journalism is that some forms of journalism which are ripe for exploration in terms of
contemporary debate emerge for the first time, refreshing and broadening the quality of
discussion as they go. One of the aims of studies of popular culture is to go into areas
which have been deemed as unsuitable for academic or critical scrutiny. Here, Nice,
herself a former editor of teenage girls magazines, boldly goes . . . ! Charting the
relationship of teenage girls magazines against concerns with tabloidization, she
broadens both the tabloidization debate as well as providing a professionally informed
critique of teenage girls magazines themselves and their controversial yet popular
didactic function. In doing so she holds out the promise of a more reflective
engagement with this sub-genre of journalism aimed at a critically neglected part of
the popular market. Taking the sex and sensation part of the popular/tabloid remit, she
explores how the coverage of sex in teenage magazines may well serve a public service
function while managing to produce profit and large-scale readerships also included in
definitions of the popular. Her professional background enables a strong engagement
with the professional voice of editors who may surprise some academic and casual
commentators in their manifest sense of commitment to a clearly imagined clientele,
one to whom they owe a strong sense of responsibility. Combining content analysis,
qualitative analysis with interviews with editors themselves she provides a highly original
account of popular media orientated towards young readers and very much aware of
their complex location between consumerism and a responsibility towards a specific and
even vulnerable audience. She moves towards the conclusion that these magazines are
more often than not empowering young readers and that sensation and sleaze are
mostly in the eye of the critical adult beholders. This popular teenage medium located

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PERMEATION AND PROFUSION

within a fiercely commercial and consumerist framework demonstrates that responsibility towards a clearly targeted readership and financial success are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. Nices study opens a portal to more investigations of an often
misunderstood area in terms of its contribution to extended discussions of the changing
role of popular journalism.
Rsslands piece enables us to take a look at a longer trajectory of popular
journalism and one which is valuable in the way it departs from the usual Anglo-American
historical narrative. His focus is on the role played by one form of journalism as it moves
from the margins of acceptability to a position within norm-defining mechanisms of
control within contemporary Norwegian society. His work concentrates on the taming of
the sensationalist aspects of popular journalisms early reliance on lurid accounts of crime
in Norwegian newspapers from the early 20th century as part of the process of
professionalization of journalism in that country. His contribution is important in a similar
way to Nices in that it revisits an aspect of popular journalism which has moved beyond a
crude appeal to the lowest common denominators of prurience and vicarious thrills to
provide a sense of shared community. It is also important in reminding us that historical
contrasts are an essential part of understanding the mechanics of contemporary popular
journalism across the world.
Popular journalism has never been one particular product. It has always been part of
a wider negotiation of the credibility of certain news media to claim to speak on behalf of
and on the interests of the ordinary people. Although this rarely means anything more
than a commitment to articulate a rhetoric which represents a particular section of the
people, this rhetoric takes on an aspect of a speech act in the way that it speaks for and
maintains the interest of a particular part of society in competition with or as a
complement to many other rival voices with a claim on the popular. Popular journalism
may not be going downhill but it is certainly being asked to provide more complex
solutions for an increasingly diverse and demanding set of audiences both national and
global. These papers offer a glimpse at part of that process of realignment to fit a
changing landscape of technological and demographic imperatives. What these pieces do
in their various ways is to map out a new set of parameters for the future of popular
journalism. This set of parameters is no less likely to be scrutinized and criticized than its
predecessors but it will help us to begin to consider what a combination of new
technological, demographic and political influences will mean to the ability of the forms of
journalism which are responding to these new influences to remain capable of articulating
contemporary events in the world to a more diverse and more fragmented range of
people than ever before. The convergence under way within the various practices and
products of journalism may well be eroding the boundaries between elite and popular
cultures but it is not leading to a set of homogeneous results. On the contrary, it is leading
to more diversity in calling upon the attention and involvement of the people in the
contemporary world as the popular mutates and migrates to other areas of the news
media environment.
It is appropriate here to thank the editor, Bob Franklin, for his invaluable expertise,
advice and enthusiasm in supporting and nurturing this project, the anonymous reviewers
for their generous yet critical engagement and last but by no means least the contributors
themselves who have provided a rich and varied set of accounts of the state of popular
journalism today.

11

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MARTIN CONBOY

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ALLAN, STUART

Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, Min Alloy

House, Regent Street, Sheffield S1 3NJ, UK. E-mail: m.conboy@sheffield.ac.uk