5 Propagandist, Professional, Processor: The Rise of the Visual Journalist

In this penultimate chapter I will set out two further phases in the history of infographics: the ideological and the professional. The ideological phase, running roughly from the 1930s to the early 1960s, drew aesthetic inspiration from the preceding commercial phase. It took shape in and among the new generation of “news processors” who dominated the 1930s newsroom; a new generation of journalists (such as Guy Bartholomew, at the Daily Mirror) who established the primacy of modern design in news. This phase is defined by the pictograph. Some were methodologically consistent and rigorous, particularly those adhering to the principles of Isotype, a method borne of the political turmoil of early twentieth-century Europe, which was intellectually informed by logical positivism and by Einsteinian relativism. Other manifestations (such as the Daily Express's Expressograph—the first regular, branded newspaper infographic in the UK) employed pictograms alongside other graphical forms; their organizing characteristics were a consistent, graphic-art aesthetic and the subservience of method to editorial propaganda. The professional phase, running roughly from the 1960s to the present day, is defined by the emergence of the visual journalist as an active figure in the newsroom contributing to, and by degrees shaping, our modern, visual news culture. These phases occurred during a time when popular culture became less local and more global, and when news audiences became increasingly fragmented, in the context of new, postindustrial educational and commercial realities.