Professor Martin Conboy
BA (Hons) (Durham), MA, PGCE, PhD (London), FRHistS
Department of Journalism Studies
Emeritus Professor of Journalism History


- Profile
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Martin read French and English at Durham University and received his MA and PhD from the Institute of Education, University of London. He lectured in the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany for five years before moving back to Britain to develop critical linguistic and historical approaches to journalism studies. He joined the Department of Journalism Studies in March 2005 and served as Professor of Journalism History, receiving emeritus status on his retirement in 2020.
He has acted as external examiner and validator for journalism degrees at 10 British universities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has acted as external examiner on over a dozen PhDs at home and abroad. He has been invited to give keynote lectures at universities around the world, from Argentina to Zurich. His research interests include historical aspects of journalism, national identity and the media, popular journalism and critical approaches to the language of journalism.
Widely published with over 60 pieces in refereed journals and edited volumes, he is the author of seven single-authored books:
- The Press and Popular Culture (2002)
- Journalism: A Critical History (2004)
- Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language (2006)
- The Language of the News (2007)
- The Language of Newspapers: Socio-historical Perspectives (2010)
- Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction (2011)
- Journalism Studies: The Basics (2012)
Martin is also the co-author with Dr Adrian Bingham of Tabloid Century (2015), the editor of How Journalism Uses History (2013), and the co-editor of The Cato Street Conspiracy (2019, with Prof Jason McElligott) and The Routledge Companion to British Media History (2015, with Dr John Steel). He is the co-editor of a series of six books entitled Journalism Studies: Key Texts.
In September 2010 he became the principal investigator on the £38,000 AHRC-funded research project 'Exploring the language of the popular in Anglo-American newspapers 1833-1988'. From 2012 to 2015 he collaborated with Professor Marcel Broersma (Groningen) on a €40,000 project sponsored by the AHRC and the Dutch NWO which investigated changing role perceptions of journalists. With Dr Adrian Bingham of the Department of History he shared responsibility for the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded €7,000 by Marsh's Library, Dublin to organise a conference and publication reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the Cato Street conspiracy.
Martin is a member of eight international editorial boards including the three main journals in the field: Journalism Studies; Media History; and Journalism: Theory Practice and Criticism. In addition, he is a regular contributor to broadcast debates on popular culture and tabloid journalism.
- Publications
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Books
- Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present. Oxford: Peter Lang.
- Journalism Studies: The Basics. Taylor and Francis.
- Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd.
- Journalism: A Critical History. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Edited books
Journal articles
- A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900. Library & Information History, 35(3), 176-177.
- Journalism has no future: A hypothesis for the neo-liberal era. Journalism, 20(1), 17-20. View this article in WRRO
- Book review: Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRESS/POLITICS, 23(3), 413-415. View this article in WRRO
- What Is Journalism? The Art and Politics of a Rupture. European Journal of Communication, 32(6), 623-626. View this article in WRRO
- Journalism and the Democratic Market Society. Journalism Studies, 18(10), 1263-1276. View this article in WRRO
- A Companion to the Australian Media. Media History, 24(2). View this article in WRRO
- How the War Made the Mirror. Media History, 23(3-4), 451-468. View this article in WRRO
- Core Blighty? How Journalists Define Themselves Through Metaphor: British Journalism Review 2011–2014. Journalism Studies, 17(7), 881-892. View this article in WRRO
- “It is Nobbut (Only) an Oligarchy that Calls Itself a ‘We’”: Perceptions of journalism and journalists in Britain 1880–1900. Journalism Studies, 17(6), 730-746. View this article in WRRO
- Locating critiques of normativity: Geo-historical perspectives. African Journalism Studies, 36(1), 77-83. View this article in WRRO
- Thematising multilingualism in the media. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(6), 628-630.
- Morbid Symptoms. Journalism Studies, 15(5), 566-575. View this article in WRRO
- Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers 1833-1988. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 15(2), 159-164.
- Livingstone and the legacy of Empire in the journalistic imagination. Ecquid Novi, 35(1), 3-8. View this article in WRRO
- The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s-1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 118(2), 582-583.
- Journalism history-a debate. Journalism Studies.
- INTRODUCTION: Journalism and history: Dialogues. Media History.
- British Comics: A Cultural History. By James Chapman. Reaktion Books. 2011. 304pp. £25.00.. Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 96(1), 114-115.
- Introducción. Medicina Clínica, 137, 1-2.
- Introduction: How journalism uses history. Journalism Practice, 5(5), 506-519.
- The Changing Faces of Journalism: tabloidization, technology and truthiness. JOURNALISM STUD, 12(3), 399-400.
- FROM "WE" TO "ME" The changing construction of popular tabloid journalism. JOURNALISM STUD, 11(4), 500-510. View this article in WRRO
- The Paradoxes of Journalism History. HIST J FILM RADIO TV, 30(3), 411-420.
- A parachute of popularity for a commodity in freefall?. Journalism, 10(3), 306-308.
- THE DAILY MIRROR AND THE CREATION OF A COMMERCIAL POPULAR LANGUAGE A people's war: a people's paper?. JOURNALISM STUD, 10(5), 639-654.
- The pursuit of public journalism. EUR J COMMUN, 23(3), 365-366.
- THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS Historical perspectives. JOURNALISM STUD, 9(5), 650-661.
- PERMEATION AND PROFUSION. Journalism Studies, 8(1), 1-12.
- The Discourse of Location. European Journal of Communication, 14(3), 353-377.
Chapters
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Writing and journalism: Politics, social movements, and the public sphere, Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text (pp. 249-268).
- Chapter 7. British popular newspaper traditions, Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse (pp. 119-136). John Benjamins Publishing Company
- The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights Routledge
- Newspaper, History of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- New Media Language Routledge
Book reviews
- Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. European Journal of Communication, 32(6), 620-622.
- Book review: Eileen Reeves Evening news: Optics, astronomy and journalism in early modern Europe. Journalism, 16(8), 1141-1142.
- Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson, and Samantha Pegg. Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820–2010.. The American Historical Review, 120(1), 332-333.
Conference proceedings papers
Working papers
- View this article in WRRO
Presentations
- Teaching activities
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Martin's teaching and research were more extensive than the title 'professor' might imply. Unusually for a professor, he is a qualified teacher (PGCE) and worked for over ten years in comprehensive schools in south London before developing a career as an academic. He even received an award for an aspect of his performance in one particular school but modesty prevents him revealing what precisely. Suffice to say he still has the certificate and is happy to reveal further details on request.
He qualified to teach English as a foreign language and has done so both at home and in Germany and Sudan. All his teaching emerged from his published work on the news media, especially his interests in national identity, language and tabloid and celebrity culture. In addition he is an active member of the Association of Journalism Education and has served on its committee.