Od Brousku ke Kurýru
From Brousek till Kurýr

The development of Czech mass newspapers from popular press to the illustrated dailies and its Central European preconditions

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyse the development of popular press in Czech lands in the second half of the 19th century and Fin de siècle period. Its progress is closely related to the development of distinctive kind of Central European mass pictorial press. Global patterns of successful mass daily press were adapted to address the Central European audience, its specific local beliefs, values and desires as well as political settings. During the analysed era, even the members of lower social classes broadened their economic and cultural potency and thus capacity to absorb the development of new common culture generated by the rapid industrialization and urbanization. The author demonstrates the way how publishers tried to capture a new urban audience, and their attempts to develop a formula how to inform, entertain and persuade their less educated and less experienced audience from lower strata. In the case of Prague popular press, the need to accommodate readers’ habits resulted in the nature of the newspaper’s stream of information and entertainment remaining halfway between the rural and the metropolitan, the traditional and the modern.

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