"Terrible losses! Thousands killed! The emperor has abdicated! " - who doesn't remember shouting these headlines barefoot boys - newspaper sellers from Soviet films about the revolution? But this is not about them, but about what exactly they shouted, trying to earn a dime on the cobblestones of the beginning of the last century. What were these headlines like? What caught the eye of our ancestors when they opened the pages of local newspapers over morning tea in a provincial town 100 years ago?
Until 1899, for example, in the Yaroslavl province there were only two local newspapers published by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, "Yaroslavl Provincial Vedomosti"and" Yaroslavl Diocesan Vedomosti". By the beginning of the XX century, there were up to a dozen of them in different periods, however, except for the newspaper " Northern Territory "and" Voice", all the others were published only sporadically.
The newspaper headlines of the early nineteen-hundredths were all very much the same. For example, in the so-called "official" part of the Yaroslavl Provincial Gazette (all newspapers published by the provincial government were divided into two parts - official and unofficial), the titles did not change during the period from 1900 to 1917. From the room
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The same thing was repeated in the room: "Orders of the Government", "Official changes", "Announcements and notices" with subsections "On the sale of estates", "On military service", "On a dead body", "On a call to auction", etc. The content of "announcements and orders" was updated every time, but the title was not.
There was more variety in the unofficial part, but even here the headlines in the first year of the twentieth century do not shine with variety. The main method of heading is rubrication, and the names of the categories move from one newspaper to another and change quite rarely. Texts that differ in content under the same heading most often do not have separate headings and are separated only by spaces: "Foreign News", "Local News", "Regional Department", "City Chronicle", " Telegrams "(messages of the Russian Telegraph Agency), "Internal News" or simply "Chronicle" (the newspapers Golos, Yaroslavskiye Gubernskie Vedomosti, and Severny Krai). The desire to title the text in provincial newspapers of the XIX and first years of the XX centuries is practically exhausted by this.
The Yaroslavl Diocesan Gazette was a collection of extensive articles by authors from the clergy. Here, each article has its own title, but all of them are cliched, for example: "A word for the New Year", "A word for the week of meat Lent", "A word at the laying of the church on the branch of the Moscow-Arkhangelsk railway", "Speech at the funeral service of a pupil of the Diocesan School Vera Troitskaya". Note that the cliched nature of headlines is determined by the very genre of articles, which is very close to the genre of church sermons.
The usual style of sensationalism in headlines is unfamiliar to journalists at the beginning of the XX century. A common feature of all headlines during this period is the desire to identify the topic of the article, to help the reader navigate among the newspaper's texts, and not to draw his attention to any publication, since this was not required. In the absence of significant competition, provincial newspapers had their own regular readers, who learned local news by reading the newspapers from cover to cover.
Everything begins to change with the emergence of new, private newspapers, which were called to the arena of history by life itself.
The established system of titles in provincial newspapers begins to break down during periods of social upheaval and wars, which were rich in the period of history from 1900 to 1917. This is most pronounced during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Russo-Japanese and First World Wars. First of all, journalists start giving separate names to each article, even if it is only a few lines long. In the beginning, only the most important messages are awarded headlines - articles chronicling military operations during the Russo-Japanese and World War I. However, gradually this
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The principle applies to events in Russian life as well as to news from abroad. Categories are also saved: for example, all articles about the First World War go under the heading " War " (Northern Territory. 1905). At the same time, such a local chronicle may still be given without separate headlines.
Here are some of the headlines from 1905: "Gullah incident", "On Chinese Neutrality", "Japanese Losses", "Oyama Offensive", "Medicine at War", " Where is our squadron?", "Unrest in Korea". Even from these examples, it is noticeable that the very principle of heading changes. There are forms of expression (question) and evaluation, however, the latter is quite episodic, the evaluation in the title is most often a means of expressing the official position and propaganda: "The Apotheosis of German atrocities "(Northern Territory. 1915. N 36), "A touching example of love for the tsar and the Fatherland", "The Holy War and its justification", " Sedition "(article about the murder of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in St. Petersburg. Yaroslavl Diocesan Gazette. 1915. N 2; 1905. N 8). The last headline is indicative of another trend that emerged at the beginning of the century in the headlines of provincial newspapers and is characteristic of modern journalism - the desire to put in the headline not the topic of the text, but exclusively new information on the topic. Thus, in the full statement "Murder of the Grand Duke-sedition", the topic "murder of the Grand Duke" is omitted as either a well-known fact, or a fact that the reader will still learn about after reading the text under such an expressive title.
The departure from the title-topic is also expressed in other ways. The desire for a headline that accumulates all the news presented in the text of the article begins to manifest itself: "The Japanese are coming", "Snow in the south of France", "Japanese spy caught", " Daring theft from Lyon "(Voice. 1905. N 6), "Inspector General of Infantry Grinnenberg, according to rumors, is leaving his post" (Yaroslavl Provincial Vedomosti. 1905. N 91). It is characteristic that such headlines appear mainly in the section of foreign or capital news, as well as military chronicles. Perhaps this innovation was learned by provincial journalists from the capital or foreign publications.
Modern authors distinguish three main functions in newspaper headlines: nominative, communicative (informative) and advertising (Shostak M. N. The Journalist and his Work, Moscow, 1998). During the period from 1900 to 1917, the advertising function begins, although very rarely, to manifest itself. This is also observed in the appearing materials "for interest", the information of which is not important, but entertaining. Oxymorons are gradually becoming fashionable - "The Living Dead" (Yaroslavl Provincial Vedomosti. 1905. N 18), phraseological units - " Feast during the plague "(Voice. 1914), irony - "Protest of the thieves 'organization" (Yaroslavl provincial Vedomosti. 1915. N 96), rito-
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ethical questions - " How long?" (Yaroslavl Diocesan Gazette. 1915. N 2), which undoubtedly gives liveliness to the headline and to the newspaper in general.
The current title system changes rather slowly. The opposite processes can also be observed-the preservation of the well-established usual way of heading articles, as happened with the Yaroslavl Diocesan Vedomosti, which at the beginning of 1917 stopped publishing the unofficial part altogether and printed only church resolutions and orders under the appropriate headings. Yet it was the period from 1900 to 1917 when the headline in the provincial press underwent a noticeable change, gradually but still approaching the headline that we are used to seeing on the pages of modern newspapers.
Yaroslavl
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