Whenever someone asks me what my job is i say i read newspapers for a living....its true! i do! they may be 75 years old - but i still get paid to read and write about newspapers (oh and film and broadcasting....my mum is convinced its just a ruse for me to watch and analyse my favourite film Brief Encounter...i can neither confirm nor deny this....who am i kidding ...i love that film :P)
I'm a first year, soon to be second year Phd student at Aberystwyth uni - i live in the back arse end of nowhere but i came here coz this was where the money was....who'd have thunk it! I'm part of Leverhulme funded 3 year project on World War Two Newspapers and the wider implications of Media within British culture at the time - there are 5 of us on this project, 2 Phd students (me and the delightful Kris, whose presence in my life with such statements as "Churchill really was a dick wasn't he?" will keep me grounded on this project) our Post Doc Marc (who also keeps me cheered and suitably merry with such hilarious gems as this on a wet n windy Wednesday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxEHi6Mlzmk dont ask us why we found it so funny and required a full 20mins away from our newspaper coding work to recover....we just did) and our two supervisors Dr. Sian Nicholas and Prof. Tom O'Malley (no he's not an alley cat as my friend Emily asked but a fantastic Prof. whose gonna get me through my Phd kicking and screaming....but one day iv threatened to sing that song from The Aristocats to him...maybe at the next christmas party after copious amounts of Bombay Saphire.....hmmmmmm) And the aim of our little humble gathering? Well, in a nutshell, it's entitled A social and cultural history of the British press in World War II and basically we're going to try and achieve a greater understanding of the content of newspapers during World War Two, to use the newspaper as a historical source in itself rather than a means to an end for another story and investigate what role the media played within society and culture as a whole (that is the greatly shortened version...come have a cup of tea with Tom sometime and hel wax lyrical about it all day long...go on you know you want to, hes great to listen to....:P
Hopefully by the end of it we'll have 2 new Phd theses and an edited collection of articles covering a wide range of topics including the structure of the wartime press, censorship,reporting the war at home and overseas, family life and its representations in the press, crime, sport, etc etc Obviously all this is still under construction and constantly changing but you get the idea. So where does this blog come in i hear you cry (or at least i thought you did...did you? i dont know...are the voices in my head at it again??) WELL......to get the raw data for this project, we are all going to be doing an awful lot of coding. What do i mean by this? literally - every day - turning the pages of our chosen sample of newspapers (we're still arguing about exactly what the sample will be as we are limited to the next 2 years to get it all done) and assigning a code to each story on each page of every newspaper. As you can imagine, this is hugely time consuming as each page of a newspaper has at least 20/30 items on it and we have to code everything and when i mean everything...I MEAN EVERYTHING (adverts, headlines....the LOT). And then factor in that each edition probably has at least 10 pages to it (as the war goes on paper rationing comes into play so newspapers were limited to about 4-6 pages...god bless paper rationing is all i can say)....and thats just one paper on one day...think of us trying to code several newspapers over several years....have you gone cross eyed with all that number crunching in your head yet? i did!! (But im crap at maths so what ya gonna do).
After we have got this beautiful, glorious, fantazmagorical raw data we can then start analysing it (Ooooooo) and start to draw some conclusions about the relationship between society and the press etc etc i bet your all on tenterhooks for the results....yessss i thought you might be!
I got sidetracked - where does this blog come in?? (come on girl concentrate please)....
Over the course of my coding already, iv been coming across some very funny, touching, lovely, scary and just downright wierd stories within our newspapers of choice and iv been sharing them with my friends and occasionally on twitter. Iv accumulated a bit of a back catalogue of articles which range from being hilarious to thought provoking - and i wanted to share them in this blog :) Also as we progress to the analysis stage i thought id share some of our findings as we go along. You know...just for a lark like!
I love reading the newspaper; i devour editions of the Guardian, The Observer, Independent etc on regular occasions and can describe myself as a Liberal, left winger who adores things such as the NHS and Polar Bears :P You will NEVER catch me reading The Daily Fail or The Torygraph (only good thing in that is the Matt cartoons and i refuse to spend hard earned cash for a cheap 20second laugh....although he is bloody hilarious...so u never knw). However, many of the newspapers we're looking at include The Daily Mail, The Express, News of The World, (as well as looking at The Guardian ...cant help myself....although its a tough read back in the 1940's...u ever tried to code a page of classified adds? it gets dull real bloody quick :S) and within this blog i want to document how these papers present key events to the public and how their attitudes/tone/political allegiances are possibly different to their modern day equivilant...... (trust me The News of The World aint changed much by all accounts...its got an obsession with Bigamy stories....3 on 1page in one edition....seriously 3...how interesting is Bigamy i ask you?!!?) I also believe that a look back at newspapers and the media during the 20th Century will be an exceptionally revealing exercise especially considering that the news/twitter/fb has in recent weeks/months been filled with discussion of the Leveson Inquiry and our current modern day relationship between successive governments and the press! This has sparked my interest on a historical level - just how far back does this 'close' relationship between press and government go? How integrated and influenced were our politicians by great Media Moghuls such as Lord Beaverbrook? (god this is beginning to sound like the introduction to an essay or one of my chapters...il stop now...you get the point and i dont want to show you all the goods up front hehe)
I might occasionally share other stuff as well (i do go on political rants from time to time) but primarily this blog will be sharing the content of 6 glorious years of newspaper content - the wierd and wonderful, the hilarious and sometimes the downright heartbreaking (war isn't all fun and games you know).
So here goes....grab a cup of tea and a selection of lovely biscuits (coz whats a peruse of the morning papers without a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive...or crumpets...i like crumpets :P) and i do hope you enjoy reading the paper with me :D
TTFN xxx
ps. isnt he a cutie? This is what i look like while reading the paper....sans Whiskers u understand...
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