Ralph David Blumenfeld

Blumenfeld 1919

Ralph David Blumenfeld (also known as RDB) (born April 7, 1868 in Watertown, Wisconsin ; died July 17, 1948 in Great Dunmow, Essex ) was an American-British journalist and newspaper manager.

Life and activity

Blumenfeld was the fourth son of David Blumenfeld , a professor of literature and history from Nuremberg who emigrated to the United States after the revolution of 1848, and his wife Nancy. The father was the founder of the German-language newspaper Der Weltbürger , which was widely read in the Midwest among Americans of German origin. Blumenfeld's godfather was the temporary American Interior Minister Carl Schurz , also a revolutionary who emigrated to the States after the failure of the March Revolution of 848.

Influenced by his father's activities, Blumenfeld embarked on a career in journalism: he initially worked in his father's editorial team before starting as an editor at the Chicago Record-Herald newspaper in 1884 . From 1886 he worked for the United Press (UP) news agency in New York City. In 1887 he came to London for the first time on behalf of the UP to report on the 50th anniversary of the throne of the British Queen Victoria.

From 1889 he wrote for the New York Evening Telegram newspaper . An article written by Blumenfeld about a major fire in the Morning Journal brought him the attention of James Gordon Bennett, Jr. of the New York Herald , who recruited him as a reporter for that newspaper from the UP. From then on he was special correspondent for the Herald in London for two years (1892-1894) .

In 1892, Blumenfeld turned away from the journalistic profession to become an entrepreneur: He specialized in the sale of Linoytpen machines and made a substantial fortune as Managing Director of the Empire Typesetting Machines Company. In 1894 he settled in Great Britain.

In 1900, Blumenfeld was persuaded by the British newspaper tycoon Albert Harmsworth , Lord Northcliffe, to return to the journalistic profession and to take over the editing of the political section of the Daily Mail, which was part of Northcliffe's media empire . In 1902 he switched to the tabloid Daily Express , founded in 1900 , in which he quickly became an influential man: In 1908, Blumenfeld - naturalized as a British citizen in 1907 - became director of the company that published this newspaper and from 1909 he officially acted as the editor of the Express : This post , which he held until his retirement in 1932, he held both under the original owner Pearson and under Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who took over the newspaper in 1916. During his almost thirty years with the Express, Blumenfeld contributed significantly to the development of the forms and techniques of modern British (and worldwide) tabloid journalism that have dominated since then: he introduced the concept of "screaming headlines" (mostly presented in the form of thick banners) and the Trick to create headlines in the form of puns to make them particularly memorable in the British press. Especially with a view to the Express, he modernized its appearance (format, font, etc.) and ensured that it printed news instead of small advertisements on the front page.

In 1932, Blumenfeld handed over the publishing of the Express to his protégé Beverley Baxter and went into retirement. However, he held the post of Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Express (Chairman of the Board of Directors ) and the London Express Newspaper Company from 1932 , which he retained until his death in 1948. In old age, his health severely affected by a stroke since 1936, wrote a series of memoirs about his journalistic career and his youth in Wisconsin. He lived most of those years at the Muscombs farmhouse in Great Dunmow, Essex.

Politically, Blumenfeld was close to the Conservative Party, in which he had great influence in the 1920s and 1930s as a close friend of Stanley Baldwin , the long-time British Prime Minister. He was also the first press man to be accepted into the Carlton Club , the London club of most of the leading conservative politicians. Accordingly, he was a supporter of free trade and a laissze-faire attitude on economic issues, and a sharp opponent of socialism, which was also reflected in his participation in the establishment of the Anti-Socialist Union in 1908.

In the late 1930s, Blumenfeld's Jewish ancestry and his leading role in the British press brought him into the sights of the National Socialist police, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who In the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, special SS commandos that followed the occupation troops should be located and arrested with special priority.

In 1928 he was president of the Institute of Journalists.

Fonts

• The Pick Ax Club , 1885.
• Exiled in England , 1896.
• In the Day of Bicycles and Bustles , 1930.
• Ralph Davi Blumefeld's Diary 1887-1914 , 1930.
• What Is a Journalist , 1930.
• All in A Lifetime , 1931
• The Press in My Time , 1933.
• RDB's Procession , 1935.
• Home Town: Story of a Dream that Came True , 1944.

literature

• Laurel Brake / Marysa Demoor: Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland , pp. 62f.
• William D. Rubinstein / Michael Jolles / Hilary L. Rubinstein: The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History , 2011, pp. 106f.
• Blumenfeld, Ralph David , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1972, Volume 4, Col. 1141

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1] .