Tabloid journalism | Definition, Impact & History (2024)

tabloid journalism, type of popular, largely sensationalistic journalism that takes its name from the format of a small newspaper, roughly half the size of an ordinary broadsheet. Tabloid journalism is not, however, found only in newspapers, and not every newspaper that is printed in tabloid format is a tabloid in content and style. Notably, many free local publications historically have been printed in tabloid format, and in the early 21st century several traditional British broadsheet newspapers, such as The Independent, The Times, and The Scotsman, changed to the smaller size, preferring, however, to call it “compact” format. On the other hand, one of the most-popular tabloids in Europe, the German Bild-Zeitung, was long printed as a broadsheet before shifting, as did many German newspapers, to a format that was smaller than a broadsheet but bigger than the standard tabloid.

The origins of the term tabloid are disputed. According to the most-plausible explanation, the name derives from tablet, the product of compressed pharmaceuticals. Tabloid—a combination of tablet and alkaloid—was a trademark for tablets introduced by Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. in 1884. Within a couple of years, the connotation of being compressed was transferred to other entities and activities, including a new kind of reporting that condensed stories into a simplified, concentrated style.

In 1900 Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, invited Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northciffe), founder of the Daily Mail in London, to edit the World for one day. Harmsworth’s imaginative version of the World, which came out on January 1, 1901, was half the size of the paper’s customary format and was heralded as the “newspaper of the 20th century.” Harmsworth’s conception of a tabloid, however, referred not to the reduced size of the newspaper but to the economical use of printing space, which he filled with short stories, short paragraphs, and simple sentences.

In 1903 Harmsworth started the first modern tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, in London. Appealing to the mass market, it presented crime stories, human tragedies, celebrity gossip, sports, comics, and puzzles. The Mirror offered more photographs than other newspapers and presented its stories in a reduced and easy-to-read manner. By 1909 it was selling a million copies per day. Soon the new British tabloids the Daily Sketch and the Daily Graphic were employing Harmsworth’s concept.

In terms of print circulation, the British press of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was dominated by tabloids: five national dailies (Daily Express, The Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Mail, and The Sun) and their respective Sunday papers had a combined circulation of roughly 10 million at the middle of the second decade of the 21st century. Despite the fact that their emphasis was clearly on entertainment and not on news coverage or political issues, the nationally distributed British tabloids remained an important force in public-opinion building.

In the 1970s many U.S. tabloids were transformed into weekly publications and shifted from newsstand to supermarket distribution. By the 2010s the main producer of tabloid weeklies in the United States was American Media, Inc., based in Boca Raton, Florida, which published some of the most-popular tabloids in the United States; those included the National Enquirer, the Globe, and the Star, which devoted themselves almost completely to coverage of Hollywood and other American celebrities. Also originally published by American Media, Weekly World News (which ceased publication in 2007 but returned under new ownership as an online-only presence in 2011) and Sun focused on the weird and bizarre, featuring (largely) faked news stories of aliens and supernatural powers, religious prophecies, curious mysteries, juicy scandals, and political conspiracies. Much influenced by Weekly World News and Sun, The Onion (founded in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1988)) took the lampooning of news and culture to new levels of satirical absurdity both in print and online.

From the 1980s and ’90s, the tabloid as a journalistic model for popular entertainment appealing to a mass audience was successfully applied to television, producing low-brow talk shows such as Jerry Springer and pseudo-documentaries such as Unsolved Mysteries. At the forefront of the “tabloidization” of online media was TMZ.com (a name derived from the term thirty mile zone, which once referred to an area within Los Angeles that was governed by set a of rules for location shooting by the motion-picture industry), founded in 2005. The celebrity-focused Web site expanded to include a television component, TMZ on TV, in 2007. Whatever media technology may be applied, tabloid journalism seems to have become a persistent cultural phenomenon of modern society.