Full of news, starved of comment: The changing content of British newspapers over the last 25 years

Posted by Soraya Kishtwari on May 18, 2009 at 9:57 AM

A Guardian look at the way newspaper content has changed over the last 25 years reveals that today's British newspapers contain a lot more commentary than they did a quarter of a century earlier.

Amusingly, Peter Wilby opens his article by asking: "How did readers know what to think in 1984?" in reference to the lack of opinion pages on offer at the time, noting that the likes of the Times and the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Sun - known these days for their plethora of opinionated columnists - only had one or two regular dedicated contributors.

This is in contrast to the number of news stories which, if anything, were higher at a time when newspapers "believed that their prime duty was to report what had happened the previous day," says Wilby.

"Nearly all stories had "yesterday" in the first sentence. The future tense - "the minister is expected to say today", "Club X will this week sign Player Y" - was rare," Wilby tells us. Meanwhile, foreign news was deemed more important, with foreign-news articles located in the beginning pages of a paper and occupying more column inches.

With regards to the culture of celebrity - a contemporary news priority - this was only in its early stages in 1984. The Daily Mail and the Daily Express, in Jean Rook and Lynda Lee-Potter respectively, did have two columnists ready to dispense advice to celebrities in need, although at the time, the main celebrities around were considered to be the Royals. Broadsheets refrained from reporting on such matters. "Guardian readers got a diet of trade unions, green belts and polytechnics; on a lucky day, they might get a story about a cat up a tree," notes Wilby.

Features were also rare, we are told, with titles like the Telegraph's "Taking a close look at stitching through the ages" and "Showing the best of British baskets" suggesting that they were also arguably rarely riveting.

Wilby concludes his article by asking the following question: "were newspapers then better or worse?" and decides simply that they were calmer. Despite a few strongly-worded headlines, the same story did not dominate page after page for weeks on end "creating a kind of emotional tsunami, as a similar issue might now."

Sources: Guardian.co.uk