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During the interwar years, gendered inequalities in newspaper newsrooms and social prejudice against 'mobile' women combined to force women who wanted to work as foreign correspondents to seek alternative routes to raising their voices on international affairs. Women's reportage can be found in a range of platforms from the mainstream press to early journals of humanitarian communication and literary magazines. When women reported for major newspapers they were often precariously freelance and the gendered nature of their treatment by newspaper hierarchies emphasised their, and all women's, outsider status when it came to international politics. Women's international journalism, often rooted in the humanitarian tradition, concentrated on telling the lives of minor characters and ordinary people, and offers insights into individual human suffering at a time of great international anxiety. Their writing, often anonymous or in overlooked niche publications, represents a missing actor on public opinion at this critical time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women's involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands, and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focusing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of wartime readers' lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers' responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The enormous changes wrought in the British newspaper industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a revolution in newspaper reading habits, financing and influence, all aspects of which have been well documented by historians of the press. But what of the contributor, particularly the freelance whose millions of words formed, mostly anonymously, the content of the new mass market press? How did writers negotiate changes in the literary marketplace during this time as editors demanded more ‘news’ and less in the way of whimsical paragraphing, and sketches, the traditional newspaper output of the professional man, or woman, of letters? Through the study of memoirs, correspondence and the fictional output of contributors to the press during this time, it is possible to discern the often fraught relations between writers and their most lucrative market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although the figure of the journalist is a familiar character of Victorian and Edwardian literature, in 1909 a new figure connected with the press emerges in English letters and becomes a preoccupation for writers for the next thirty years: the popular press baron. While Edwardian 'newspaper fictions' portrayed him as an entrepreneurial genius, more literary writers became increasingly concerned with popular newspaper proprietors' ability to distort the literary marketplace and devalue language. By the mid to late 1930s the fictional press baron becomes increasingly threatening not just to leftwing politics and writers' ability to get published but to faith in the value of the written word itself. In this study I will attempt to account for this character's emergence in fiction, and writers' attitudes towards him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing numbers of women journalists entering the profession in the early twentieth century provoked mixed reactions from contemporary novelists. Responses evolved from cheering on a doughty pioneer to questioning whether women's presence in the mass print media was helping reform the status of women or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Little is known about the personal struggles of women journalists in the early years of the popular press. In the absence of plentiful data, the study of novels and short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and written by men and women working in the early twentieth-century newspaper industry, combined with analysis of previously un-studied memoirs and early guides for women journalists, illuminate the obstacles—and opportunities—experienced by these pioneers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines fictional representations of journalists and journalism from Guy Thorne's Edwardian bestseller When it Was Dark (1903) through to novels of the interwar years. It examines how literature about journalism and journalists addresses contemporary issues such as the march of technology; the relationship between politics and the press at a time when the franchise was extending; the increasing ‘mediation’ of politics and anxieties about the growth of sensational journalism. Of particular note is the dramatic change in the character of the journalist in these years, from democracy-defending Fourth Estate hero to cynical hack. It concludes that First World War press ‘failings', the ennoblement of press barons, the growing power of a mass medium and the evaporation of social idealism after the war combined to destroy the once heroic image. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]