Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead Graham Law and Matthew Sterenberg Though the phrase the ‘New Journalism’ did not become current in British periodicals until the later 1880s — the earliest recorded instances appear to date from articles issued around the middle of the decade — the first signs of those tendencies towards the personalization, popularization, and commercialization of the newspaper press suggested by the term can be detected at least as early as the mid-century

Though the phrase the ‘New Journalism’ did not become current in British periodicals until the later 1880s — the earliest recorded instances appear to date from articles issued around the middle of the decade — the first signs of those tendencies towards the personalization, popularization, and commercialization of the newspaper press suggested by the term can be detected at least as early as the mid-century. 1 This article attempts to contribute to the theorization of the shift from the ‘Old’ to the ‘New Journalism’ during the latter part of the nineteenth century, by applying to it the analysis of the structural transformation of the public sphere as elaborated by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 study focusing on the modern period, and summarized in a more wide-ranging encyclopedia article in 1964. 2 As Mark Hampton has suggested, scholarship concerning the New Journalism remains generally ‘under-theorized’ in relation to Habermas’s thinking on communications media, a deficit that can only partly be accounted for by the fact that the German’s seminal study was not translated into English until 1989. 3

opinion be shaped. Habermas traces the origins of the public sphere not only to the literary miscellanies of the eighteenth century, but also to its salons and coffee-houses, where 'privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted' (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 51). Habermas then employs the term 'structural transformation' to refer to the historical process whereby, with the emergence of commodity capitalism in societies in both Western Europe and North America, there is a transition from 'a journalism of conviction to one of commerce' ('Public Sphere', p. 53). The former is shown to be mediated by private men of letters working for small publishing businesses typically under local family ownership; the latter via the consumer services marketed to a mass audience by media conglomerates.
Habermas sees this change, where 'rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception', as resulting inevitably in a weakening of the critical functions of the public sphere through the increasing intrusion -'colonization' is the metaphor more recently preferred by Habermas himselfof both corporate and government interests. 4

I
We focus specifically on key theoretical interventions during the later nineteenth century, by E. S. Dallas (1828Dallas ( -1879 and W. T. Stead (1849Stead ( -1912. This is because these two writers seem to us to be among the most critically aware and professionally innovative of Victorian journalists. 'More than any of his contemporaries, Stead wrote about his profession as well as practising it […]. He repeatedly attempts to pin down the significance of current practice through critical reflection', in the words of Laurel Brake; while Dallas has recently been described as 'the Marshall McLuhan of the mid-nineteenth century'. 5 Before getting down to the ideas, though, we need briefly to establish a material context for the texts in questions, which are Dallas's two-part discussion of the periodical press, appearing anonymously in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in early 1859, and Stead's initial pair of signed articles for the Contemporary Review, Much of Dallas's writing appeared anonymously in a variety of metropolitan journals, including the Saturday Review and the evening Pall Mall Gazette, though his most consistent berth as a journalist was as a prolific obituarist, reviewer, and political commentator on the staff of The Times, which he joined in the mid-1850s. 7 Dallas wrote his piece on the periodical press at a triumphal moment for nineteenth-century liberalism, shortly before the final step in the abolition of the long-standing fiscal constraints on public communicationthe imposts on advertising, news publication, and paper for printing, known to their many opponents as the 'taxes on knowledge' ('Popular Literature This was becoming a standard term with reference to periodicals targeting not common readers en masse, but rather those finely differentiated categories of subscribers affiliated to specific religious, political, professional, social, regional, and cultural  roller-press or electric telegraph, pulp paper-making or stereotype settingthough their interest was less in the economic and technological causes than in the social and political consequences; less in quantitative than qualitative signs of change. Beginning with Dallas and moving on to Stead, we will attempt to analyse their ideas on journalism as outlined in the texts in question, in each case in terms of a cycle of Authorship, Publishing, and Readership resulting in the formation of Public Opinion. This represents a version of the 'communications circuit' identified by Robert Darnton, though in a simplified form because the distribution of journals tends to be so much more streamlined than that of bound volumes, the print medium on which he largely focuses. 12 As noted by Darnton, an international pioneer in the development of the interdisciplinary field known as histoire du livre or book history, despite variations of place, time, and medium, the communications circuit consistently 'transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again' (p. 67).

II
As regards authorship, in the Blackwood's articles Dallas stresses that, because of the multiplication of periodical titles of all kinds, the practice of writing for publication is 'fast ceasing to be a peculiar profession, and is becoming an ordinary accomplishmenta  In this dialectical process Dallas perceives a virtuous circle of interaction among authors, publishers, and readers that serves to promote the healthy cultivation of public opinion, and thus anticipates Habermas in identifying the periodical press as a key institution in the formation of the bourgeois public sphere.

III
Let us then turn to Stead's vision of the press, articulated a quarter of a century later in his contributions to the Contemporary Review. Stead's ultimate concern is with the healthy formation of 'public opinion', a phrase that recurs twenty-six times in the two articles, so that the media historian Jean K. Chalaby is able to claim Stead's work as 'the first journalistic interpretation of the notion of public opinion, defined as an aggregate of personal and private opinions', thus prefiguring the twentieth-century practice of opinion-polling. 15  And, doubtless recalling how the 'Maiden Tribute' campaign provoked a long-term loss in advertising revenue rather greater than the temporary increase from street sales, he notes bitterly that the reformist editor has 'his Achilles' heel' in the dependence on advertisers in thrall to 'Mrs Grundy'. 16 Yet the irony seems unconscious when he unfavourably contrasts the sextennial mandate of the Member of Parliament with that of the popular editor which is 'renewed day by day', when 'his electors register their vote by a voluntary payment of the daily pence. There is no limitation of age or sex. Whosoever has a penny has a vote' ('Government by Journalism', p. 655). This entry into the cash nexus, which converts an act of civic responsibility into one of private consumption, surely undermines there was thus a notice in bold capitals offering the refined and apparently generous sum of 'one guinea per column' to 'litterateurs' for original contributions. There were regular interactive features like the 'Inquiry Column' where subscribers both asked and answered examination-style questions, with the reader who scored best over a three-month period winning ten guineas. Even letters to the editor were drawn into the cash nexus in the 'Correspondence' section, where the focus was on trivial, pre-assigned themes such as 'Is Early Rising a Mistake?' or 'Who are Most Polite -Men or Women?' 18 There were publicity-oriented prize competitions on a lavish scale, such as the 'Tit-Bits Villa Competition' of 1884 that received over 20,000 entries, and many more readers made a day trip to Dulwich to inspect the bijou residence on offer, each purchasing a souvenir postcard to celebrate the outing. In a substantial 'Answers to Correspondents' department run by the proprietor himself, Newnes constructed an editorial identity that was chummy, personal, comic, and self-dramatizing. In short, the forms of editor-subscriber interaction found in the late-Victorian mass-market periodical fostered as little rational-critical sense as the audience 'vote-off' in contemporary 'Reality TV' shows like Big Brother or American Idol.
At the same time, though its earliest issues contained no external advertising, Tit-Bits soon began to feature numerous and extensive display notices for dubious patent medicines and food products like 'Salt Regal', sold as a 'preventive and safeguard' not  only against 'the coming epidemic of influenza' but also 'malaria, cholera, and the like'; as well as its own-brand goods such as 'Tit-Bits Tea' ('You like the Journal, Try the Tea') ( Figures 3 and 4). The paper also turned itself into the vehicle for the most enterprising and interactive cross-media advertising campaigns of the era, which radically confused public interest and private profit. Among the most audacious publicity stunts were: the 'Tit-Bits Insurance Scheme' from 1885, where each subscriber carrying a current copy of the paper and meeting a fatal railway accident would leave his or her next of kin better off by £100; and the 'Tit-Bits Hospitals Fund Campaign' of 1889, whereby, through a process of 'cooperative philanthropy' the proprietors would give £10,000 to the Hospitals Fund and a small reward to the 'willing Tit-Bits canvassers' recruited -IF the paper's circulation were raised above half a million (Jackson, pp. 209-10). With its subscribers thus willingly co-opted not only as consumers but also as marketing agents, Tit-Bits managed to achieve a circulation of over 600,000 by 1893. 19 Thus Newnes's Tit-Bits approaches the extreme version of a new journalism of commerce envisaged by Karl Bücher, in an analysis quoted approvingly by Habermas, where the periodical 'assumes the character of an enterprise which produces advertising space as a commodity that is made marketable by means of an editorial section'. 20

V
The character of Newnes's flagship journal helps to reveal radical changes in the role of the publisher and in modes of publication prevalent at the turn of the century, changes that remain largely obscured from view in Stead's own articles for the Contemporary Review.
Today, micro-blogging services like Twitter or Sina Weibo, and more general platforms for mobile social networking such as Facebook or Netlog, are often conceived as new modes of new journalism, with potentially radical socio-political consequences whether in North America, China, or the Middle East. 21 At the same time, many scholars have underlined the contrary tendencies of social media increasingly to commodify social interaction in the interests of maximizing private profit or to facilitate systematic government surveillance of the thoughts and actions of citizens. 22 In this context, applying Habermas's concept of articles in the journal New Media and Society, including Zizi Papacharissi, 'The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere', in New Media and Society, 4 (2002), 9-27.