"A little steam, a little sizzle and a little sleaze": English-Language Tabloids in the Interwar Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IA little steam, a little sizzle and a little sleaze": English-Language Tabloids in the Interwar Period' Susan E. Houstonz Muckraking tabloid weeklies were a largely successful -and invariably controversial -part of Canadian English-language journalism in the years between the First and Second World Wars.While Bob Edwards' Calgary Eye Opener and J.R. Rogers' jack• Canuck• were notable pre- World War I pioneers, the racy r-cent weekly hit its stride after the W~ar.'Each new venture bore the indelible mark of its editor/ publisher, each of whom was assailed widely for publishing 'scurrilous' and 'corrupting' material.The papers differed markedly in their scale of operations and journalistic sophistication and until the late 1930s there was no consistent tabloid 'look.'Their common trade was in 'sensationalism,' a perennial, if unstable, element of more than two centuries of North American journalism.As Bill Sloan observed in his recent study of supermarket tabloids, the public has apparently a "timeless desire to be horrified, outraged, amaiz~ed, scandalized, amused, infuriated, and titillated (not necessarily in that order)."4Tabloids occupy such an identifiable niche in the early twentyfirst century popular press that the term can be misleading.Today it conjures up journalistic excesses beyond the wildest imaginings of the earnest proprietors of Canada's pre-World WXar II muckraking weeklies.Even then, the look and tone of these self-consciously irreverent papers became as quickly dated as the fashion pages
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".