Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Tabloid journalists often get a bad press. From publishing libelous headlines to hacking celebrities' phones,

recent years haven't exactly done much to enhance Fleet Street's reputation.

But where did tabloid journalism originally come from?

And have media barons always had such a profound influence on current affairs?

Well, in today's episode, journalism lecturer Terry Kirby

talks to John Borkham about the evolution of the popular press, covering everything from Georgian

gossip sheets to the rise of the empire of Rupert Murdoch. So, Terry, your new book, The Newsmongers,

covers the entire history of tabloid journalism right through to the digital age. Before we get going, what do we actually mean when we say

the word tabloid? Tabloid is a word that is in very popular, well-known news now, but it's a relatively

modern word. It came into being

in the latter half of the 19th century as a sort of portmanteau description of a new type of

medicine that was being marketed by what became known as the welcome drugs company, now quite

again, quite a well-known name. And it was a portmanteau word that described a tablet and alkaloid. And it became

into popular use as something that was a sort of concentrated form of almost anything. It had never

been applied to newspapers. On the night of December 31st, 1900, on the eve of what was then considered to be the start of the new century,

January the 1st, 1901, Alfred Harnsworth, who was the founder of the Daily Mail and a sort of dazzling genius of popular newspapers, was invited by Pulitzer, who was the editor of the New York world, and the man who later gave his

name to the Pulitzer Park Prize and founded the Columbia School of Journalism. And he asked

Alfred Hansworth to edit the edition of the New York World, which was a sort of popular

newspaper in New York, and he gave him full control. And Hansworth was a man

of incredible self-confidence and self-belief, and he thought he could do anything. And he'd always

propounded this idea of a more concentrated form of journalism. And he created the paper, and he put

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