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Abstract
In the second half of the twentieth century, the volume, content and appearance of arts journalism in Western daily newspapers have changed significantly in accordance with wider transformations in the arts and journalism. Previous studies have focused on (1) which culture receives attention, (2) the way culture gets attention, and (3) economic pressures underlying transformations. In this article we aim to bring these strands together by analyzing how changes in the packaging of arts journalism have evolved in relation to the cultural content which is discussed and the volume of (cultural) advertising that is featured in newspapers. We conduct a content analysis of the coverage given to both “highbrow” and “popular” art forms in French, German, Dutch and US elite newspapers for four sample years: 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005. The results show that newspapers all seem to converge into a balance between news reporting and reviewing. We find evidence for an increased catering for the needs and interests of audiences in some aspects (e.g. more popular culture) but not in others (e.g. no more human interest). Finally, most newspapers show an increase in cultural advertising, although the European newspapers in our sample contain much less advertising than the American ones. A stronger presence of advertising is positively related to both a lifestyle orientation of newspapers and a focus on popular culture.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For helpful comments and suggestions, the authors would like to thank both the Guest Editors and the anonymous reviewers of this special issue.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. For brevity’s sake, we use the term Western countries in the context of this article to refer to Western European countries, the United States and Canada.
2. However, Weibull (2005) found that in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom the young population read more than the rest of the population.
3. As numerous participation studies have shown.
4. For European countries, this also applies to domestic cultural industries—such as the film, television and publishing industry—that could expand their production thanks to all kinds of state support aimed at improving the competitive position of these industries and at leveling the growing dominance of cultural imports from abroad, in particular, the United States.
5. This seems to be particularly true of individuals with high occupational status who tend to have wide-ranging networks that require knowledge of a wide variety of cultural forms (DiMaggio Citation1987, 444).
6. See the project’s website: http://www.eshcc.eur.nl/viciproject/.
7. However, it should be noted that this argument to focus on elite newspapers is strongly tied to the societies under investigation. In other contexts (periods, places), perhaps alternative argumentations would have been more apt.
8. For instance, the intellectually leading newspapers in the United States are all regionally based, although the largest ones, including the two most influential and here selected papers, the NYT and the LAT, are distributed all over the country.
9. Note that the data collection took place in 2005–2006. While we acknowledge that a new more recent sample year would be very welcome, limitations in resources have so far prevented us from doing so.
10. Over-sampling weekdays on which special cultural sections appear would therefore be unwise. There might be systematic differentiation by weekday in the sort of cultural disciplines or the types of article that are dealt with.
11. According to sampling efficiency studies, two constructed weeks suffice for representing a year’s content adequately (Riffe, Aust, and Lacy Citation1993). We used two extra constructed weeks to be on the safe side. Moreover, selecting additional weeks increases the total sample of content units, which improves both the reliability in general and the detail level at which reliable analyses can be made.
12. Very small advertisements were not individually measured, but as bulk advertisements. We will therefore not use counts of the number of advertisements but use the size in cm2. Due to time limitations not all sampled editions for the LAT 1975 and 1995 were coded for advertisements and service articles.
13. The NYT has Sunday editions for the whole period; the FAZ has also Sunday editions in 2005. For the LAT editions per year were coded.
14. The space devoted to advertisements is not included in these figures.
15. Minimum score was set at 0, and then divided by the maximum, and multiplied by 10.