This proposed chapter will be informed by methods from cultural history, material culture and visual studies, acknowledging recent contributions to the history of journalism such as those of Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) on 'the form of the news', or Francesco Franchi (2014) on recent developments in editorial design in a multi-media environment. Alongside more textual and literary contributions on the ‘language of the news’ this chapter will examine visual content contributing to the discourses of the page (Conboy 2010), examining design as the expression of technological/ economic constraints and opportunities where print design interacts with other mediums of mass communication throughout the twentieth century. As Ardis argues (2008: 30), print itself was an emerging new medium in the period of modernism and New Journalism around 1900. Such intermediality has only complexified further throughout the century, with new print formats and reporting styles expressed through innovations such as the adoption of colour offset litho or in current print/ digital interactions. The emphasis in this chapter on images in mass media will allow case studies on some of the technical and commercial changes in design in relation to the increasing emphasis on such ‘non-news’ elements as fashion and entertainment in magazines and newspapers, and the scope, not just across publications, but across the close but diverging fortunes of the regions and countries in this study will offer a unique point of view into the daily or weekly pull of forces of conformity and change within individual publications as a consumer product.

As already stated, the specific geographical/ political focus across Great Britain and Ireland offers the opportunity to consider more nuanced case studies and examples of diverging practices under the local cultural conditions developing in Ireland (South and North) and Great Britain in the twentieth century, and the role of images within the ‘imagined community’ sketched by particular publications (Anderson 2004). This opportunity suggests that a useful theme to examine through case studies is that of nation building and political agitation on all sides of this relationship. This theme can encompass events such as Dublin Eucharistic Congress 1932 (Turpin 2006) or the British Empire Exhibition 1924, but should also include: both World Wars, Irish independence, civil war, the emergency period in Ireland 1939-45, and the ‘long war’ of the Troubles c.1969-1995 (Baker 2005) examining the use of visual images as propaganda, or as subject to censorship. Images, that is not in isolation, but within the overall visual impact of publications as varied as Picture Post or An Phoblacht.