Chapter 3: Newspaper Dynamics and Crime Reporting
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Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/87416 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Wilkinson, E.C. Title: Drama in the dailies : violence and gender in Dutch newspapers, 1880 to 1930 Issue Date: 2020-04-23 Chapter 3: Newspaper dynamics and crime reporting This chapter looks at the Dutch newspaper market and the factors that influenced the selection and presentation of stories of private violence. To do this, it draws on the model presented in Chapter 1, which identifies the sources and the target readership as the key determining factors. The media landscape changed dramatically between 1880 and 1930, with the rise of the mass-market newspaper and the feminization of the media. As was discussed in Chapter 1, the literature to date on press coverage of violence and gender has largely failed to take account of these changes. This has limited the explanatory power of these studies. Crime stories are seen as inevitably sensational and little insight is given into why the press crime discourse changed over time or differed between countries.1 Moreover, the literature largely ignores the extensive body of scholarship in media studies on how journalists arrive at their content.2 Some historical studies take a more holistic approach. For example, Nathaniel Wood looks at the influence of New Journalism and the interaction between the press, the authorities and a female-dominated public in the production and dissemination of sex crime news in early twentieth-century Cracow: this allows him to criticize simplistic assumptions that the press dictated the discourse on sex scandals. 3 The current chapter addresses three questions. First, it considers how and why the target readership changed and how this affected the imagined community that was implicit in the newspapers’ stories. The effect of the changing target readership on the style and content is also considered. The second question concerns the mediating effect of sources: what sources did journalists use and what impact did this have on crime coverage? Thirdly, the question of how the newspapers engaged readers in stories of private violence is considered. Chapter 2 already showed that the Dutch general public was not involved in the prosecution of justice to the same extent as laypeople in other countries. This chapter considers whether the press sought to engage readers emotionally in accounts of violent crimes and whether newspapers encouraged active involvement in the administration of justice. The first section in this chapter deals with the Dutch newspaper market. That market expanded between 1880 and 1930 and the target readership broadened to include the working classes and women readers. Section 2 examines the significance of stories of family 1 For examples where extensive crime coverage is assumed to equate to sensationalism, see: Linders and Van Gundy-Yoder, “Gall, Gallantry,” 329-330; Ramey, “Bloody Blonde,” 627-631; Christopher A. Casey, “Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 3 (2011): 372. 2 Key texts used in the present study include: Laughey, Media Theory; Manning, News and News Sources; Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message. Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content (White Plains: Longman, 1996); Jewkes, Media & Crime. 3 Nathaniel D. Wood, “Sex Scandals, Sexual Violence, and the Word on the Street: The Kolasówna ‘Lustmord’ in Cracow's Popular Press, 1905-1906,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (2011): 243-269. 85 Chapter 3 and sexual violence in the editorial content. Journalists increased coverage of such cases in the period prior to the First World War as part of the strategy of appealing to the new readers. Stories resonated with readers, but the press remained aloof from the administration of justice. Section 3 looks at journalists’ representation of the accused, in particular the practice of using initials rather than full names. This gave journalists an additional tool for shaming perpetrators. In the fourth section, the news values are explored that journalists used to select and present stories. The fifth section deals with the sources journalists used, such as the police and other newspapers. The sources influenced the geographical spread of stories and encouraged homogeneity across newspapers. The final section looks at the form and style of the articles on family and sexual violence. It argues that sensationalism was used strategically, and most items fitted an institutional narrative. 3.1 Expanding market and rising importance of female readers The expanding population and rising prosperity described in the previous chapter fostered the expansion of the market for newspapers. The Dutch newspaper market took off in the decades following the removal of taxes on newspapers (dagbladzegel) in 1869.4 Circulation increased from 90,000 in 1866 to around 1 million in 1910 while the number of newspaper titles increased from 160 in 1869 to 760 in 1894.5 The market received another boost during the First World War, with the thirst for news that this produced. In 1939, circulation was over 2 million.6 The number of readers was always considerably more than the number of copies sold. Newspapers were available in cafes and lending libraries, and they could also be rented.7 By the interwar period, most Dutch people must have regularly read a paper: a survey in 1946 found that 97 per cent of men and 94 per cent of women read one or more newspapers daily.8 The burgeoning newspaper market was the combined result of democratization of reading and falling production costs. Boudien de Vries has charted the ownership of books and use of lending libraries from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. She concludes that the key factors in the spread of the reading habit to the lower middle and working classes were rising incomes and expanding leisure time, in combination with a proliferation of distribution channels for printed materials; there were more bookshops, more libraries and more door-to-door salesmen selling cheap editions of genre novels.9 4 Pier Abe Santema, “Jacob Hepkema en de introductie van de moderne journalistiek in Friesland,” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 8, no. 1 (2005): 86. 5 Huub Wijfjes, “Modernization of Style and Form in Dutch Journalism, 1870-1914,” in Form and Style in Journalism. European Newspapers and the Representation of News, 1880-2005, ed. Marcel Broersma (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 6869. 6 Marcel Broersma, “Botsende Stijlen. De Eerste Wereldoorlog en de Nederlandse Journalistieke Cultuur,” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 2, no. 2 (1999):54-55; Van de Plasse, Kroniek, 202. 7 Boudien de Vries, Leescultuur in Haarlem, 88-104; Scheffer, In vorm gegoten, 217. 8 Schuit and Hemels, Recepten en rolpatronen, 21. 9 Boudien de Vries, Leescultuur in Haarlem, 88-104, 403-405. 86 Newspaper dynamics Newspapers were generally the first step in the acquisition of the reading habit. Moreover, they became more affordable thanks to technical advances such as the introduction of the rotary press and the switch from cotton to wood pulp for paper. This enabled newspaper proprietors to increase the number of pages, and in some cases offer separate morning and evening editions, without raising prices.10 Three kinds of newspaper flourished in the expanding market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: newspapers with a political or religious affiliation; regional and local newspapers; and national newspapers aimed at a mass market.11 The first category was a feature of the pillarized society in which each pillar had its own newspapers as a way of engaging its rank and file and propagating its views. For example, the orthodox Protestants had De Standaard (founded in 1872), while the socialists had Het Volk (launched in 1900).12 These ideological newspapers had a combined market share of 45 per cent in 1939. As explained in Chapter 1, this segment has not been included in the scope of the current study. The current study focuses on four politically neutral newspapers: the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, Leeuwarder Courant, De Telegraaf and Algemeen Handelsblad. It examines their coverage in 1880, 1895, 1910, 1920 and 1930. As De Telegraaf was only founded in the early 1890s, Het Nieuws van de Dag has been used instead in 1880. The Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad was an example of the category of regional and local newspapers. It was aimed at readers in and around the fast-growing industrial city and port of Rotterdam. Founded in 1878, it was initially conceived as a rival to the upmarket Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant and targeted local businessmen. But this strategy was a commercial failure and in the mid-1880s it reinvented itself as a mass-market paper for a broad social spectrum. Given that most of Rotterdam’s population belonged to the working class or lower-middle-class, these became Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad’s target readership.13 It cut its quarterly subscription price from 2.25 guilders in 1880 to 1.25 guilders in 1895 and changed its content to focus on local affairs rather than foreign politics. The new strategy was a success. Circulation rose from around 4000 in 1880 to 50,000 in 1900 (when the city had around 65,000 households) and over 100,000 in 1939 (when the number of households was about 140,000), see Figure 2.14 10 Scheffer, In vorm gegoten, 68-74; Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 7-25. 11 Wijfjes, “Modernization,” 69. 12 Van de Plasse,