The Advent of Popular Media

The Advent of Popular Media

The expansion of printing presses and the internationalization of news agencies were contributing factors in the growth of a worldwide newspaper industry. The Times of India was founded in 1838 while Southeast Asia’s premier newspaper The Straits Times was started as a daily newspaper from Singapore in 1858. Advances in printing technology meant that newspapers in non-European languages could also be printed and distributed. By 1870 more than 140 newspapers were being printed in Indian languages; in Cairo Al-Ahram, the newspaper which has defined Arab journalism for more than a century, was established in 1875, while in 1890, Japan’s most respected newspaper Asahi Shimbun (Morning Sun) was founded. In Europe, the growth of popular press was unprecedented in the 1890s – France’s Le Petit Parisien had a circulation of 1 million in 1890, while in Britain, the Daily Mail, launched in 1896, which redefined boundaries of journalism, was doing roaring business.
Newspapers were used by leaders to articulate nascent nationalism in many Asian countries. The Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat Sen founded Chung-kuo Jih-pao (Chinese daily paper) in 1899 while in India Mahatma Gandhi used Young India, later named Harijan to propagate an anticolonial agenda.
However, it was the USA which had the biggest international impact on media cultures symbolized by William Randolph Hearst, one of the world’s first media moguls. His New York Journal heralded the penny press in the USA, while the International News Service, which sold articles, crossword puzzles and comic strips to newspapers, created the world’s first syndicate service. It was succeeded in 1915 by the King Feature Syndicate, whose comic strips were used by newspapers all over the world, for most of the twentieth century.
The internationalization of a nascent mass culture, however, began with the film industry. Following the first screening in Paris and Berlin in 1895, films were being seen a year later from Bombay to Buenos Aires. By the First World War, the European market was dominated by the firm Pathe, founded in 1907 in France, whose distribution bureaux were located in seven European countries as well as in Turkey, the USA and Brazil. The development of independent studios between 1909 and 1913 led to the growth of the Hollywood film industry which was to dominate global film production (Mattelart, 1994).
In the realm of popular music, the dog and trumpet logo of ‘His Master’s Voice’ (HMV) label of the Gramophone Company, became a global image. Within a few years of the founding of the company, in 1897, its recording engineers were at work in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, India, Iran and China. By 1906, 60 per cent of the company’s profits were earned from overseas sales (Pandit, 1996: 57). After its merger with the US giant Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931 it formed EMI (Electric and Musical Industries), beginning a process of Anglo-American domination of the international recording industry that has lasted throughout the twentieth century.
By the end of the nineteenth century, US-based advertising companies were already looking beyond the domestic market. J. Walter Thompson, for example, established ‘sales bureau’ in London in 1899. The USA, where advertising was given its modern form, was an early convert to the power of advertising, making it the world’s most consumerist society. The spending on advertising in the USA increased from $0.45 billion at the start of the century to $212 billion by its end.
In the twentieth century, advertising became increasingly important in international communication. From the 1901 advertisement for the record label His Master’s Voice to the famous 1929 line ‘The pause that refreshes’, to De Beers’ hugely popular campaign ‘A diamond is forever’ put out in 1948, advertisers have aimed at international audiences. This trend became even stronger with the growth of radio and television, with messages such as Pepsi-Cola’s 1964 ‘The Pepsi generation’; Coca-Cola’s 1970 rebuke ‘It’s the real thing’; Nike’s 1988 slogan ‘Just do it’ and Coca-Cola’s 1993 one-word advice, ‘Always’, being consumed across the world.
The American cowboy and masculine trademark of The Marlboro Man, introduced in 1955 and identified with Philip Morris’s Marlboro cigarettes, became a worldwide advertising presence, making Marlboro the best-selling cigarette in the world. Though tobacco advertisements were banned on the USA television in 1971 and since then health groups have fought against promoting smoking through advertisement in the USA and other Western countries, The Marlboro Man was nominated as the icon of the twentieth century by the US trade journal Advertising Age International.

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