Giggles for the gaggle

Matthew Engel, a journalist, opens his history of the popular press by explaining that, though he has never worked on a popular newspaper, he does not apologise for the fact because, he says, most histories of newspapers are written by academics with no direct experience of the practice of journalism at all.

But this is untrue, as a glance at his extensive bibliography would show. It is also unfair: journalists should be the last people to argue that direct experience is essential in writing about a subject with conviction or authority. Were this so, Engel could not have made his name as one of the sharpest, wittiest cricket writers in the national press, far superior to rivals with much greater playing credentials.

His sports-writing career shows a sharp eye for idiocy, idiosyncrasy and anecdote that transfers well to a field extraordinarily rich in all three. The familiar stories are here: the Daily Mail hat fiasco; Beaverbrook pretending to run Elias through with a sword; Cudlipp and the assembled Mirror apparatchiks laughing at the first issue of the relaunched Sun. Engel enjoys a good one-liner, although he has missed one of the best and most perceptive on an individual paper - Colin Seymour-Ure on The Sun "literally outstripping The Mirror" in the 1970s.

To have produced an up-to-date, popular history of the popular press would have been worthwhile; and Engel's book is much more readable than earlier works by journalists such as Francis Williams, Hugh Cudlipp and Charles Wintour. But Engel has gone far beyond that. He has spent his time crouched over dusty volumes and creaking microfilm machines at the National Newspaper Library. He shows himself to be a real historian.

Others confronted with a commission to write a book timed to coincide with the centenary of the popular press might have contented themselves by going back to Lord Northcliffe's launch of the Mail in 1896. Engel not only goes back to predecessors in the bestseller slot - The Times and The Daily Telegraph -but looks at papers that anticipated important aspects of the Mail's appeal. His conclusion that "almost nothing in The Daily Mail was original. What Alfred Harmsworth did was to get the elements right. He lined up the three bells on the fruit machine" is both perceptive and apt; his metaphor does justice to the sheer difficulty of getting the paper right in so fiercely competitive a market.

A similarly sharp eye for weaknesses in conventional wisdom is revealed by his intriguing suggestion that a Telegraph journalist was the pioneer of popular press techniques; his efficient debunking of the Mail's earliest sales claims; his perceptive contention that while Lord Rothermere may have ruined the Mail in the interwar years his local newspaper wars helped save it afterwards; as well as his note that Rupert Murdoch is in cold fact a scion of the establishment.

Among the handicaps facing the newspaper historian is that there is so much source material and so many ways of treating the topic. You cannot cover everything, and sensibly Engel does not try. Instead he concentrates on the content of each paper and its relation to the mood of the time, explaining how the Mail, Express and Mirror in their turn enjoyed 30 to 40-year spells of getting all three bells in a row. If the rule still applies, the Sun should be about halfway through its spell, before it loses out to a fresher rival. Engel is particularly good on the Mirror, which is apparently the only paper of the four for which his technical admiration is supplemented by a degree of affection.

The book's title is derived from a verse that circulated in Fleet Street in the last century: Tickle the public, make 'em grin The more you tickle, the more you'll win Teach the public, you'll never get rich You'll live like a beggar and die in a ditch.

But teaching and tickling are not necessarily mutually exclusive -Engel's achievement is that he manages to do both.

Huw Richards, a reporter on The THES, is writing a history of The Daily Herald.