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Chapter 8 (part 2)

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 10 months ago

Comments and Discussion:

 

Elisa: Another important aspect regards The Tabloid Zone.

 

In the 17th century small-format newspapers appeared in Germany. When in the 19th century the size of papers grew, smaller formats were used by illustrated newspapers.

In the 20th century tabloids used a smaller format and usually a large headline or a single image took the entire page.

At the end of the century tabloids weren’t considered a new invention but a traditional form of news.

Modern tabloids used their different format to establish a sort of authority.

It is difficult to divide the tabloids in phases because they aren’t clearly demarcated.

 

Libera:

I’ve found very interesting the relation between press and history, that we can find in the Americanization part.

We know that for dictatorships the circulation of news have always been important, often a façade for horrendous events versus the clandestine press, and the fact that Franco considered the press his enemy, can illustrate very well these aspects.

Also Mussolini knew the important role of the press (ha has been also the director of L’Avanti!) and, during his dictatorship, he has overworked the media.

These are only a couple of examples that can underline the importance of journalism, its history, its changes, its fights. Now I’m thinking about all that journalists that have lost their lives for their ideals and for freedom.

I think that they make part of the changes we are studying.

I know it is not a technical change but I think it's important.

 

Gabriela:

The modern style brought the form of the professional newspaper: the way news was presented in the newspapers become independent from its own system of production.

Now, being in the modern era, the world of the newspaper was involved in the social, cultural and political environment and, meanwhile they were “fighting” with other forms of the media as: television and radio.

 

There appeared two “repertoires of design innovation in the US newspapers”

• The practices of the press anywhere in the world

• The broadcasting of news on the computer networks

 

The form of news contained three dimensions:

• The reminiscence of the vernacular forms although the modern newspaper appeared

• The modern phases changed from Protomodernism to Late modernism

• The visual form of the newspapers changed from reserved from the most emphatic

 

 

In this paragraph I am giving you some facts aboult the tabloids.

TABLOID-small format newspapers focusing facts from the lives of celebrities, sports, crimes;

Tabloid is also known as gutter press by people who wish to express it in a negative manner.

Tabloids tend to emphasize sensational stories and are prone to create their news if they feel that they won’t find any news. (Personal translation)

This kind of newspapers offered a moral rather than an intellectual picture of the world and attracted the reader with future predictions and narratives-emotional contents.

Headlines also had an important role because their content attracted the reader also with the photos.

Modernist tabloids had a pshichological theme: the dilemma between the passion and the reason.

 

Americanizing-concentrate the attention on exclusive American forms of news and design, ignoring the European.

A wrong process, because at the Armory Show in 1913 lots of American newspapers adopted European designers and illustrators for their innovative ideas.

The image of the American newspapers started to control other forms of newspapers, and so the world of the journals was the same in all the parts of the world.

We should forget the commercial and the financial relations between Europe and America and cultivate our own ideas. The world must keep all its colors….not to have only one…

 

 

The World Wide Web became like a scarecrow for the printed press.

 

Advantages Disadvantages

-free access to everyone -payable archives

-fast news -the restricted space of the articles

-small space -little information

-articles by freelancers -not “homemade” news

The quality of the online newspapers is that after the reader sees them, they remain imprimated on his visual memory-photographic memory.

 

The most important fact of the online press is the banners for the ads placed across the top (they attract the eye of the viewer with animations and moving pictures).

 

As time went by, in the online format, the news was reduced at headlines and short lists-the economy of the space and each story has a traffic ranking-how many times each piece of news has been accessed.

The electronic form of the once printed press facilitates the broadcasting of the news, but not in the written way, by pictures, which marks the presence of the expressionism (the emphasis of the image) and so the modern era of the newspapers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tabloid zone

Small format newspapers have existed since the earliest news sheets appeared in Germany in the seventeenth century. As mainstream newspapers grew ever larger, reaching blanket size in the nineteenth century, smaller formats became a region of change and experimentation. Illustrated newspapers, for instance, adopted a small format and helped establish its special visual role. The irreverent, screaming tabloid is a twentieth-century invention, usually dated from 1903, when the Daily Mirror was founded in London. Within its small size, a tabloid adopted a moral rather than intellectual picture of the world. Instead of pretending to map the world for readers, tell them what mattered most, and predict their future, the tabloid attempted to move readers by activating fundamental values and replaying timeless narratives.

 

Through their gimmicks and stunts, tabloids became a popular alternative, surpassing the circulation of serious broadsheets. Both formats became fixtures in major cities through much of the twentieth century, London being the prime example. The tabloid format developed not only to fit emotion-laden contents but also to heighten their visual impact. One large headline or single image could fully dominate the small tabloid page. The small size of the page made the large item all the more dramatic by contrast. The drama of tabloid news was a modernist invention. In the arts, expressionism developed dialectically, as a response to the abstract and idealist tendencies within modernism. Abstractionists celebrated precision and purity of form and saw the potential of machine processes and industrial organization, where their opposites sought to express human suffering at the hand of modern industrial and war machinery and its vast destructive capacity. The counterpoint between tabloid and broadsheet reiterated the dialectics of artistic modernism.

 

Over the course of the century, however, the alignment of form and content eroded. Large newspapers were unwieldy to read and costly to produce, and broadsheets eventually shrank so much that the smallest of them became hardly much larger than the largest tabloids. For a time, the format distinction came to depend less on size and more on proportion and sectioning. The standard broadsheet remained slightly larger, but the ratio of page height to width became more telling. The taller, narrower proportions of the broadsheet page allowed the sort of subdividing required to build a visual hierarchy with several levels, from the most to the least important news. Also, the long page fairly insisted on being folded in half, and that quality allowed the format to hold together when assembled from separate sections, which in turn permitted further rationalizing and subdividing of content.

 

The modern penchant for organizing things, however, pushed the two forms closer. The tabloid's squat proportions couldn't accommodate sections as easily, and as all newspapers got fatter from more advertising, the tabloid resisted folding at all. But tabloids could organize content in other ways, by providing alternative entrances such as the back page and by developing upside-down and pull out sections. The qualities of tabloid format also appealed to modernists. The slightly smaller size seemed more manageable, for example, and satisfied the modernist preference for forms convenient to use. By mid-century the linkage between a newspaper's format and its editorial approach became open to challenge. On Long Island, outside New York City, Newsday under the publishership of Bill Moyers, for example, gave new seriousness to the tabloid format in the 1960s (Hutt, 1973).

 

In our survey we found that tabloid newspapers reiterated and replayed the main forces behind the development of the format: the conflicting claims of traditional versus modern authority, the contradictory appeals to moralistic emotion versus abstract rationality, and the push of past successes versus the pull of innovation. At the end of the century, tabloids were no longer recent inventions but one more traditional form of news. The fate of the tabloid paralleled that of many modernist ideas: it joined the mainstream. The process was aided by the fact the modernism so closely aligned itself with corporate interests. Modernist abstractionism and expressionism reiterated themselves in the corporate world as the dialectic of production versus marketing. Production demands rational, repeatable processes, but marketing demands creative and original appeals to emotion.

 

The most traditional in their approach to the form of news were the vernacular tabloids in our survey. They stuck with long-existing nameplates and other marking devices, such as sigs for columns that appeared in every issue. They also gave pride of place to miscellaneous content. News items ran in widely varied levels of emphasis, drawing from a range of typefaces, decorative or ruled lines of any weight, tint or shadow boxes, and so forth. The miscellany of news seemed to imply a populist lack of uniformity, calling forth a reader capable of picking and choosing. Only the discipline of traditional, repeated forms intervened to avoid chaos. In diversity of visual items, vernacular tabloids were similar to broadsheets, but the reserved-to-emphatic dimension was more pronounced in tabloids. The range of visual mood went from the calm reserve of Trybuna, in Warsaw, Poland, for example, to the anguished emphasis of newspapers such as Nova Bosna, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The emphatic side of the range was the more inventive. The most extreme examples, which weren't included in our survey because they weren't represented in the collections of libraries and embassies, are the U. S. supermarket tabloids, throwaway advertisers, and fringe weeklies - all in tabloid format. These provide a counterpoint to the power of mainstream newspapers and also act as a zone of innovation.

 

Modern tabloids in our survey used their different format to assert a different sort of authority. The main national newspapers (or those with ambitions to that status) in many countries adopted modern style as they allied themselves with central authority. Modernist tabloids confronted a contradictory task, to speak simultaneously with the voice of passion and the voice of reason. As a result, they adopted many, but not all, of the ordering and mapping devices found in their broadsheet counterparts. The phases of modernism are less clearly demarcated than in broadsheets. Some shared many qualities from the Proto-Modern phase, but we found it impossible to divide our tabloid sample into Classicist and High Modern phases. Instead, these two categories merged into a phase we'll call simply Modern. We did find a preponderance of Late Modern tabloids, the most corporate of design styles, as well as an anti-establishment alternative, magazine style.

 

The Proto-Modern phase in tabloids seemed to aim for the tranquillity of serious broadsheets without entirely abandoning traditional authority. The Baltic Independent of Estonia, for example, adopted some but not all of the features of modernism: uppercase and lowercase headlines, fairly uniform typefaces, rectangular shaped layouts, indexes, promotional items, and a larger scale for elements on the page. The authority of such newspapers as the Guardian, in Lagos, Nigeria, produced more fixity of design than we found in other tabloids. Publishers apparently resisted tampering with what had worked, and that success stymied any arguments for following the avant garde further into modernism.

 

The Modern phase in tabloids (which collapses together the Classicist and High Modern phases) struggled to balance the rational and expressive sides of the style. The Weekly Mail & Guardian in South Africa, for instance, countered the quieting effect of uniform typography with large-scale headlines and pictures to suggest passion. Other Modern tabloids lacked extensive indexing and devices such as promotion boxes to indicate the hierarchy of content. In Clarín of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the social map was less clear - especially compared to modernist broadsheet front pages - and the varieties of emphasis overshadowed rationalizing features such as uniform typefaces, enlarged spaces, and top-down organization. The Modern phase most clearly illustrates the divided soul of the tabloid.

 

Tabloid newspapers most often adopted Late Modern design, converging with the predominant phase for broadsheets internationally. Libération, in France, for example, employed charts and graphics, contrasting type, and many small items thoroughly indexed and well promoted, all squeezed into relatively small areas. The space used by all the organizing and publicizing devices further reduced the scale of everything else, making the tabloids into miniature versions of Late Modern broadsheets. We found that the tabloids spanned a range from somewhat emphatic, such as Eleftherotypia, of Athens, Greece, to somewhat reserved, such as La Jornada of México City, just as in the broadsheets. The particular format, along with other aspects of the look of news, no longer has a necessary relationship with the mode of production. The Late Modern newspaper, whether tabloid or broadsheet, envisions the reader as a consumer moved by style to carry, use, dip into, and scan the many small items that comprise it, not as a reader but as a participant in the marketplace of appearances.

 

Our survey also identified an alternative to the mainstream tabloid press: tabloids that took on the look of an opinion or literary magazine. Their earliest antecedents were colonial newspapers that used the front page as a cover, emphasizing a single story in a form that became rare as newspapers grew into broadsheet format (where single-story front pages appeared only for coverage of historic events). The magazine tabloid descended more recently from the Newsday of the early 1970s. Magazine style appeared to follow the modern convention of treating the page as a canvas but often without many of the promotional and organizational devices of newspaper modernism. A defining trait was the use of long stretches of text, especially on the interior pages. More than any other news form, the tabloid-magazine seemed to imagine an audience of readers prepared to respond not merely to events but to ideological (and counter-cultural) positions. Europe made a specialty of serious, intellectual tabloids - such as l'Humanité of Paris - that appear in magazine style, but some larger U.S. cities could boast one as well.

 

The organizing tendencies of modernism have not fared well in tabloids, where space is restricted or arrayed in a wider rectangle less open to subdivision. Otherwise, modernization has encouraged tabloids to reproduce the repetitive High Modern designs found in mainstream newspapers of all shapes and sizes. The more interesting tabloids occupy the margins, where they do ideological work in magazine style or push the expressive range of news to new limits, rebelling against the authority and rationality of modernism. Our survey of tabloid newspapers internationally suggested the possibility of a return to ideology and text on one hand and to emotion and visual experimentation on the other.

 

Emphatic Broadsheets

While modernist notions were spreading to the tabloids, emphatic modes of design had invaded the broadsheet format, bringing the chain of influence full circle. The region spanning Central Europe, Asia minor, and central Asia led the way toward the new form. It was less common in Western countries, where format-defined content distinctions equated broadsheets with serious and tabloids with popular news. The emphatic broadsheet nevertheless found a foothold in major Western cities. A Turkish newspaper, Tercüman, appeared in Frankfurt, Germany, for instance. In the United States the form had spread to the foreign language press, such as Maariv Israeli Daily, which a Tel Aviv newspaper published in New York City. The flow of innovation throughout the history of news form has moved from the periphery, and this instance is no different. The new broadsheet designs not only come from marginalized geographic regions but also draw inspiration from the fringe of tabloid format.

 

Of course, emphatic broadsheets are not entirely new. We found a similar experimentation in the 1930s, when the Chicago Herald and Examiner developed a tabloid-style outer cover (see Chapter 7). Like that earlier effort, the current examples can be classified as vernacular in style, an extrusion of the work of news. They mix type exuberantly and juxtapose all manner of decorative borders and boxes in irregular shapes. The large scale of the page makes these the most expressionist of all newspaper designs, with contents that combine high visual energy - extreme contrasts and variations - with miniature tidbits of news in a volatile mix. The form seems especially apt in its expression of social conditions in the unsettled regions where it emerged most recently, such as Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

 

Rational corporate processes have nevertheless had an impact on emphatic broadsheets. Some we found were hybrids, employing the cool of modern rationalism along with the heat of the shrieking tabloid. In Sarajevo, Bosnia, for example, the designers of Avaz (Figure 8.4), combined unified type, neat rectangles, and the promotional and mapping strategies of modernism with the high-contrast emphatic modes of the tabloid, all on a broadsheet page. The result most closely resembled the Late Modern mainstream of news form. In the age of the corporate newspaper, the marginal zones propose creative recombinations. The mainstream can then adopt these innovations at least in their surface manifestations, stripped of their connections to social conditions, and use them to add new visual elements and effects to existing product. The corporate newspaper uses emphatic expressionism as a way to market to the young and to stimulate the jaded. In the process, corporate interests disconnect the processes of production from the form of news. The network of relationships that constitute the newspaper no longer coincide with relationships that the form of newspapers represents.

 

 

Amercianizing form

The world's newspapers draw stylistic inspiration from a whole chorus of influences. But the somber tenor of U.S. styles has a special resonance, accompanied as it is by a symphony of economic and ideological winds and strings. The resulting strains in design trends defy transcription into a simple register of Americanization.

 

The notion of Americanization itself has changed over the course of the twentieth century. At first it was thought of as technological progress, in which American inventiveness was exported and, it was assumed, brought democracy in its wake. Following the second World War, the process became much more direct. The United States began to impose its ways by intervening with military force, applying economic pressure, and exporting a flood of cultural products. Because the form of news followed a different path internationally, the example of the press illustrates another mode of Americanization, one that is also consonant with the growth of global corporate culture.

 

U.S. newspaper designs in the first half of the twentieth century responded to movements in the arts which originated primarily in Europe. Early practitioners of self-conscious modern news design, such as John Allen (1947), operated primarily within the domestic industry. Allen's disciple Edmund Arnold (1956) continued to press for modern design, principally as a consultant with local newspapers. At the height of the movement, when modern principles largely ruled news production, the United States also became a key exporter of design ideas. The successors to Allen and Arnold carried the American brand of newspaper modernism first to Latin America and then to Europe and Asia (Barnhurst, 1994).

 

The historical development of newspapers paralleled the rise of U.S. other media to a dominant position in the global communication setting. Output such as commercial film and television programming could be exported as integrated cultural products (after some tinkering with titling or dubbing), but there was no parallel market for newspapers, except among a limited number of U.S. expatriates and language students abroad. Although newspapers remained local or at best national products, their form could be exported. To succeed in other countries, the form of news had to invade the local products without seeming to invade at all. Modernism provided its own rationale as a servant to the instrumental aims of anyone employing it. U.S. consultants spread their design sensibility by touting modernist form as an efficient conveyor of local journalism and advertising. To bolster the argument, they could claim the ostensibly neutral support of legibility research and psychological principles.

 

The spread of news form accompanied a general understanding among modernists that form could be divorced from content. Design, in other words, could be sold as a soft technology, a set of procedures and standards that would rationalize news production and news reading, while local control continued over content. The argument was of course not quite accurate. Modern style favored a certain view of readers (or, one could say, brought certain kinds of readers into view while obscuring others) and invited them into a relationship with the polity and the culture. Modern readers, although not very well informed or well equipped to judge the complexity of public affairs, did appear capable of making consumer decisions based on the stylistic appeal of products. That capacity meant that the visual effects used in marketing could be applied to news of public affairs. Modernism played a little trick on people, calling them into an audience of consumers but turning them into a public. The modern formation conceived of the newspaper itself as primarily a commercial activity, centered in corporations where journalists and reporters held key roles. The network of relationships implied by the formation had to be suppressed in order to market news form as independent of content. In other words, the form of news acted like a Trojan horse, an apparently empty vessel that appealed to a monumental visual sense and implied a symbolic victory. With those rewards and the promise of greater efficiency and better control, publishers in other countries adopted American design models without much cognizance of their ideological contents.

 

As Late Modern design spread internationally, it took root in ways peculiar to its new surroundings. Some aspects of the form appealed to particular cultures more than others. In order to understand the flow of design innovation, we selected a developed country in which modern design had a recent impact. Based on our initial overview of international newspapers, we identified Spain as such a site. The country's transition from the closed dictatorship of Franco meant that its newspapers revitalized in the last quarter of the twentieth century, at the same time that modernism reached its height. We conducted an in-depth study of the press in Spain after gathering a sample that included all of the national and most of the regional as well as many local Spanish newspapers (Barnhurst, et al, 1999).

 

Spain had been at the forefront of newspaper innovation almost a century earlier, when ABC began as one of the first picture newspapers. ABC stuck tenaciously with that initial innovation, continuing to publish drawings, cartoons, and other illustrations rather than turning to photography, and it proved stubborn as well in its support of monarchy, even during the long years of Franco, who called the newspaper the enemy. By his death in 1975, ABC stood as a bastion of conservatism in its form as well as its content. Modern design entered Spain fully developed, in the form of a new tabloid newspaper, El País, founded as the country began its transition into democracy. The newspaper adopted a left-leaning socialist editorial line and a very reserved design, infused with aspects of the High Modern. Thereafter modernism spread rapidly through the regional and local press of Spain, accompanying general economic growth as the country entered the European Community. The Spanish press drew on U.S. newspaper designs and on modernist layout ideas filtered through Europe, principally Germany, an important center for the printing trades (Lallana, 1999).

 

Modernism in Spain favored the tabloid format. It may seem unusual that the reserved version of modernism wedded in Spain with the tabloid. There the press did not follow the historical pattern set by the United States and the United Kingdom, where tabloids pursued emphatic forms of journalism, developed out of the illustrated press, and moved into serious content much later. The history of ABC accounts in some degree for the lack of emphatic newspapers in Spain. One attempt to launch a newspaper on the model of the English popular press, the short-lived tabloid Claro, failed almost immediately despite backing from the German firm Bild Zeitung and the publisher of ABC, Prensa Española. During the transition to democracy, newspapers in Spain adopted a seriousness that modernism helped express and applied a reserved design palate to the tabloid format, which was considered serious because of the example of ABC. The High Modern form of El País emerged when publisher Juan Luís Cebrian directed the initial design team to create the look of a modern broadsheet in tabloid format. The result confirmed the alignment of reserved design and tabloid format. Ironically the longevity and success of ABC undermined its experiment in popular tabloid publishing. In any case, the argument that the tabloid format is more manageable for readers, that is, more in line with the modern aim to increase functionality and efficiency, carried the day in Spain.

 

In contrast to the English model, Spain's newspapers have limited circulation (reaching only one in ten of the adult population). They encourage a clash of ideology, rather than the bland uniformity needed for mass circulation in the mainstream, and the often-understated designs reflect the commitment to debate in the public sphere. Spain shares the European custom of publishing ideological newspapers, which we mentioned earlier, a custom largely missing from the U.S. press. Other nations' media take a combative stance in part because of conditions of centralization and competition. In most countries, such as, say, Mexico or the United Kingdom, a dominant capital city produces a range of truly national media, which then differentiate themselves topically, ideologically, and economically. In the United States the only truly national news media, the broadcast networks, developed under the influence of advertisers and under federal regulations that encouraged the most bland forms possible. Meanwhile, most U.S. newspapers, including the premier dailies, operated either as local monopolies or within comfortable market niches. The differences stand out in comparison to Spain.

 

Founded in the 1950s under Franco, Spanish television always played a political role. Televisión Española operated first one and then two television stations under a state monopoly that served the regime. After the death of Franco, national television aligned with the centrist transitional government, but also acted as a force encouraging citizens to compare and weigh the political ideas found in newspapers. In the 1980s the government revised its regulations for broadcasting, allowing commercial television stations onto the airwaves. Under conditions of market competition, the new stations quickly adopted (and the state channels slowly shifted toward) U.S.-style news coverage, with its informal talk among anchors, foregrounding of private tragedies, and dramatic visual effects. The process of Americanization had begun.

 

With television as a background, Spanish newspapers also began to Americanize. The press entered a period much like the ferment in America between the world wars, but without as much raw experimentation. Spanish journalists and academics attended newspaper industry institutes in the United States, then trained designers to reproduce American layouts. Regional newspapers redesigned and reformatted themselves. Vernacular forms, such as El Día de Cuenca (Figure 8.5), El Faro Astorgano, Área, and Soria 7 Días persisted in marginalized areas, although not without some elements of modern design. The growth of newspaper chains led to the imposition of American style cookie-cutter designs. The largest of these was El Periódico, which required an identical nameplate for each of its holdings in various cities, such as Aragón (Figure 8.6).

 

 

 

American influence of a different sort figured in the birth of El Mundo, inspired by the investigative reporting of Watergate. Its founder, Pedro J. Ramírez, was working as a young intern in the Washington Post newsroom the day Nixon resigned and was an admirer of USA Today, Newsday, and U.S. magazines such as The New Yorker (Lallana, 1999). El Mundo adopted a Late Modern design and a more earthy and strident tone than El País, and it focused coverage on the scandals surrounding the socialist government of Felipe González.

 

U.S. styles provided preset patterns that happened to fit local needs in Spain. The High Modern design of El País expressed the initial moment of transition, when peaceful discourse was the most urgent necessity. The Late Modern design of El Mundo coincided with the completion of the Spain's democratic transition, when the socialist government El Mundo opposed gave up power peacefully.

 

But the influence of U.S. styles went beyond local needs. Modernist news forms encouraged and fostered elements of the American news model, characterized by local newspaper monopolies, ideological neutrality within authoritative designs, and the conception of the audience as consumers of a product subject to design obsolescence. The professionalization of reporting and design in Spain followed the American model. The institutional embodiment of the newspaper design profession went forward apace, with one of the most active chapters of the U.S.-based Society of Newspaper Design. In Spain Journalism schools had always been run by newspapers, but the U.S. model prevailed when the schools acquired the status of university departments and encouraged the publication of professional manuals to standardize practices. Contests and awards emerged to recognize and encourage adherence to modernism. For example, the university program in Navarra, an industrial region in the north, became host to a world competition in the design of information graphics.

 

The newly arriving corporate newspaper, however, clashed with the long-standing political stance of the Spanish press. The model of news as an arena for ideological competitors had been a defining aspect of newspapers in Spain, but began to lose ground to modern, functionalist notions. Late Modern design, such as found in La Vanguardia (Figure 8.7), of Barcelona, with its tightly structured pages created by U.S. designer Milton Glaser in 1989, became a mainstay in Spain, as it did internationally. The corporate newspaper packaged the news, molding real events to occupy spaces pre-designed to serve market demands. Instead of ideological competition, the modernist requirement to stay in vogue in the face of design obsolescence helped spread the American notion of market competition between newspapers and other outlets, such as radio and television. By the 1990s, the Spanish press saw a growth in news focused on personality, celebrity, and on the attention-grabbing genre called sucesos, which highlights private tragedy rather than public debate over ideology. The influence of American design reached so deeply that in 1999 Glaser returned to Spain, this time to redesign that bastion of national pride, ABC.

 

 

Adopting American design had complex and contradictory consequences in Spain. Most dramatically, the Spanish press abandoned the broadsheet format entirely by the end of the century, reading a particular line of modernist reasoning to fit local history. Newspapers also became more visually active, updating their news presentation and engaging in frequent redesigns. Design obsolescence increased awareness of and interest in newspapers as objects in the market but also made them seem less powerful and serious.

 

It might seem that by imagining the audience as an aggregate of consumers, Spanish newspapers paradoxically enhanced the independence of readers, who when faced with a less serious press had to think for themselves, but that would be too optimistic an assessment. Among young adult readers, the new designs did make newspapers more appealing, but also fed a growing disaffection toward politics (Barnhurst, 2000). Young readers in the United States, faced with news media that have subordinated public service to the search for market share, have been abandoning newspapers in accelerating numbers during the Late Modern phase. Although American modernism entered Spain under the guise of pure form, intended to enlarge the market potential of newspapers, the corporate formation of news also carried an ideological cargo, which now seems to be infecting young citizens with the same malaise found in the United States.

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