Abstract
The nineteenth century is known for its many journalistic innovations. This new journalism was an international trend that affected many countries in different ways. The Dutch variant of new journalism has mainly been studied from an institutional and professional perspective. The transformation of the news content however has seldom been
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the primary topic for research. Also, existing studies have focused on the development of the newspaper press, mostly ignoring another important news medium of that time: the pamphlet. Since the renaissance the pamphlet served as the primary news medium in the Netherlands. Sometime in the nineteenth century, however, its importance dwindled. And near the end of the century, the pamphlet had lost its former significance. The prominence of the pamphlet as the primary news medium of the Netherlands had been taken over by the flourishing newspaper. Exactly how and when this development took place has remained in the dark for a long time. This study aims to resolve the issue. Using quantitative content analysis De Graaf looks at the topics, genres and functions of the pamphlet and the newspaper to explain how and when these changes occurred. With a sample of over 1.900 pamphlets and 30.000 newspaper articles ‘Journalism in motion’ is the largest content analysis of Dutch historical news media. The comparison is not only made between pamhlets and newspapers, special attention is also given to the possibility of regional differences. That is why two very different cities have been studied: ’s-Hertogenbosch as an example of a southern, mostly catholic city and Groningen as a nortern, mostly protestant city. Despite popular assumption, there turned out to be little to no difference between the southern and northern regions. The results furthermore show large differences between the development of the pamphlet and newspaper. In the early nineteenth century the pamphlet brought a great variety of topics, genres and functions. The newspaper in comparison was quite monothematic and uniform. In the 1830’s the newspaper started changing. Journalists adopted style elements, topics and genres that were typical of the pamphlet. At the same time the pamphlet began losing many of its traditional characteristics. In the following years while the newspaper content became more diverse due to the increase of press freedom and the abolishment of heavy newspaper taxes, the pamphlet lost its charastertistic variety.
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