WHAM-BAM! A BRIEF HISTORY OF TABLOID JOURNALISM

 

Appealing to the mass market, tabloids and their rowdy style of journalism have been screaming the news for more than a century.

Beginning in Britain with the successful launch of London's Daily Mirror and Daily Sketch, tabloid journalism crossed the Atlantic Ocean more than a century ago in the form of New York's Daily News, Daily Mirror and the most notorious of all, the Evening Graphic.  

The Graphic developed a fabricating photo technique known as the "composograph."  [Rest assured your Denver Daily Sketch does not possess a "composograph."]

As an example, the Graphic's front page once featured a "photograph" of silent movie star Rudolph Valentino's spirit being greeted at the gates of heaven by opera virtuoso Enrico Caruso - as reproduced above.

The public - readers of all stripes - loved it.

Said the magazine Time: "Not all readers of that gum-chewers' sheetlet, the New York Graphic, are gum-chewers. Some of them smuggle the pink-faced tabloid into Park Avenue homes, there to read it in polite seclusion." 

Alas, advertisers did not like the Graphic - oft referred to as the "porno-Graphic - and its life was short, 1924-1932. 

The granddaddy of America's tabloids started as a Sunday evening broadsheet called New York Enquirer. It struggled. Under new ownership, was re-named National Enquirer and went tabloid with a reputation for exceedingly graphic crime scene photos - for which there was a market.

Later, of course, the National Enquirer moved toward celebrity news as a "Supermarket Tabloid" available for sale at the grocery store checkout line.

From the Enquirer spawned the now dearly departed Weekly World News, a watered-down Evening Graphic - armed with a modern-day "composograph."