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T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M
 Medill School of Journalism
VISIONS of the AMERICAN PRESS

G eneral Editor
David Abrahamson

Other titles in this series

H erbert J.G ans
Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly
News, Newsweek, and Time
M aurine H .Beasley
First Ladies and the Press:The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age
Patricia Bradley
Women and the Press:The Struggle for Equality
D avid A.C opeland
The Idea of a Free Press:The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy
M ichael Sw eeney
The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce
Patrick S.W ashburn
The African American Newspaper:Voice of Freedom
T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M
THE PRESS AND
A M E R I C A’ S E M E R G E N C E
AS A WO R L D P OW E R

David R. Spencer

Foreword by Geneva Overholser

MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
 Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2007 by David R. Spencer

Published 2007 by Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-8101-2331-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, David Ralph, 1941–.
The yellow journalism : the press and America’s emergence as a
world power/ David R. Spencer ; foreword by Geneva Overholser.
p. cm. — (Visions of the American press)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8101-2331-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Press—United States—History. 2. Journalistic ethics—United
States—History. 3. Journalists—United States—History. 4.
Sensationalism in journalism—United States—History. 5. Press—
Influence. I. Title. II. Series.
PN4864.S64 2007
071'3—dc22
2006025060

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansiz39.48-1992.
To Judi
 CONTENTS

Foreword by Geneva Overholser

ix

Preface
xiii

One
Introduction
1

Two
The Inheritance
19

Three
The New York Marketplace
53

Four
Graphic Innovation
77

Five
Fact and Fiction
95
 Six
The Spanish-American War and the Hearst Myth
123

Seven
The Correspondents
153

Eight
The Illustrators
205

Nine
Conclusion
225

Notes
231

Bibliography
249

Index
257
 FOREWORD

Geneva Overholser

As vigorously and frequently as journalists are reviled today, they

can always find refuge in this comforting thought: at least they
don’t live in the era of (shudder!) Yellow Journalism. Nothing so says
“journalism evil” as this Victorian-era chapter of press history,
when publishing titans like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph
Pulitzer went head to head—with flamboyant and often irrespon-
sible results. But is this relief-by-comparison really justified? As
you read this insightful volume by David Spencer, do not be sur-
prised if the charges about Yellow Journalism ring familiar, for
they are the very charges favored by journalism’s twenty-first-
century critics: The blurring of fact and fiction. Hyperbole and
sensationalism. An overemphasis on the negative. The undermin-
ing of society’s essential institutions. And, perhaps most chilling of
all, the notion of journalism as mere commodity.
If Yellow Journalism has provided our era with a quiver full of
proven insults, it has given us much more besides. Indeed, it has
substantially shaped today’s press, for these Yellow journalists were
nothing if not innovators. As Spencer so ably shows us, they gave
us the modern newspaper—advertising-supported, rich with
graphics and photographs and lively writing, catering to the peo-
ple, competitive, aspiring to ever-greater success in the market-
place. To be sure, some of this inheritance feels lamentable. Take
commodification: however much they led the way, even Hearst
and Pulitzer would be amazed to see how crushingly commodified

ix
x FO R E WO R D

today’s press has become, giving Wall Street more say about the
future of a given newssheet than its readers could ever hope to
have.
But the legacy is more complex still. While we never utter the
words Yellow Journalism without distaste, it is worth considering
that Pulitzer’s own vow was to provide his readers with “Brilliant
Humor, Splendid Illustrations and Stories by the Greatest Au-
thors.” There’s a formula with merit. And those “great authors”
the era’s newspapers employed—writers like Stephen Crane, edi-
tors like Lincoln Steffens—did not save their best talents for the
books we now know them for. Steffens, as this volume notes, once
assigned a story about a man who hacked his wife to death, and
here is what he told the reporter: “That man loved that woman
well enough once to marry her, and now he has hated her enough
to cut her all to pieces. If you can find out just what happened be-
tween that wedding and this murder, you will have a novel for
yourself and a short story for me. Go on now, take your time and
get this tragedy as a tragedy.” Better advice than that I never gave
as an editor. The Yellow journalists had other appealing traits.
Think Nellie Bly’s brave tales from the Women’s Lunatic Asylum
in New York. Think newspapers competing with one another to
hand out bread to the needy. Think well-told tales, booming cir-
culation, and crusades on behalf of social reform. Hmmmm . . .
sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Of course, we mustn’t skim lightly over the egregious sins of
Yellow Journalism: the warmongering, the screaming headlines,
the blatant sensationalism and woeful unfairness. But it does not
take subscribing to the worst of the many unfair charges hurled
against journalism today to acknowledge that our own media are
not all finely tuned instruments of noble betterment either, much
 FO R E WO R D xi

as we like to comfort ourselves with the distance between our

world and the Yellow one. I remember a session at a 1989 editors’
gathering on the topic of sensationalism. Our panel included Phil
Donahue, Morton Downey Jr., and Geraldo Rivera. I, by con-
trast, was one of the “respectable” journalists and all too proud of
it. Then the inimitable moderator, Fred Friendly, held up a copy
of my newspaper, the Des Moines Register. Across the front page ran
this teaser: “WAS CARY GRANT REALLY BISEXUAL?” I’ve been a lit-
tle less sure ever since about the dividing line between the virtu-
ous and the not so virtuous, journalistically speaking.
To a degree (and it probably was true in the Yellow Journalism
era, too), people find comfort in blaming the press for their own
appetites. The press in turn reassures itself that it cannot be faulted
for giving readers what they want, for it does, after all, want to be
read. And of course, the line between good and bad journalism is
unclear. Rich narrative to one reader is blurred fact to another,
and the headline that compels me to enter the story may strike you
as hopelessly hyped. But one thing is clear: the commitment to
serve the broader public good is no good at all without the tools
and talent to bring the individual along for the trip.
Now, here’s a happy thought: Yellow Journalism’s excesses
were offensive enough to help spawn, in direct response, some-
thing truly fine—the best newspaper in America, a model of dig-
nified and reliable journalism. The New York Times was born when
Adolph S. Ochs arrived from Chattanooga in 1896 to inject a very
different model into the tawdry New York City newspaper scene.
As the late Edwin Diamond noted in his book, Behind the Times,
Hearst was said to have wanted his New York Journal readers “to
look at page one and say ‘Gee Whiz,’ to turn to page two and ex-
claim ‘Holy Moses,’ and then at page three, shout ‘God
xii FO R E WO R D

Almighty!’” In contrast, Ochs’s sober credo was “All the News

That’s Fit to Print,” and he pledged “to give the news impartially
without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest in-
volved.”
So here we are in the twenty-first century, and Yellow Journal-
ism’s counterparts are easily spotted, from one cable channel’s
frenzy to top the others on the latest blonde-gone-missing story to
the blogger-world’s mountains of invective. Yet we can take
heart. Out of Yellow Journalism’s excesses came a fine new model
of newspapering, and Pulitzer’s name is now linked with the best
work the craft can produce. And today, in what seems to some an-
other nadir for the press, new forms of media are springing up
everywhere. Who knows what models will prevail? We can hope
for new heights of fairness and balance and commitment to the cit-
izens’ needs. Throw in a little humor, splendid illustrations, and
killer writing talent and salvation could be right around the corner.
 PREFACE

Every summer when I finished teaching journalism history to

incoming graduate students, I used to take one morning to talk
with the class about where we had been and what we had done
during the semester. There was nothing really unusual about that
approach, save the fact that most of my colleagues set aside a whole
day to do exactly the same thing. So, I decided that press history
should have a different sort of climax. I created a library of films
that dealt with some aspect of journalism history and spent the final
day eating popcorn and downing sodas with the students while
showing them a feature film about the world, real or imaginary,
that they were going to enter. The films covered the works of Ben
Hecht, Orson Welles, Damon Runyon, and, of course, Robert
Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Although I had long been con-
vinced that my chosen field of research was one of the more in-
teresting aspects of my existence, I also realized that it was not
something I could take for granted with graduate students.
Through no fault of their own, the students had, at best, only a
limited knowledge of the history of journalism. Often, the fault,
as Edward R. Murrow so eloquently stated during his McCarthy
broadcast, lies within ourselves. What have we been doing all
these years to promote journalism history and make it one of the
most exciting courses of study in the university calendar? In some
cases, a lot; in others, not much. So, each of us, in our own way,
can contribute our blood, sweat, and tears to the cause, which is

xiii
xiv P R E FAC E

why I took on this project when approached by senior editor

David Abrahamson.
The Yellow Press was of particular interest to me, not because
I am a great fan of sensationalism but because the emergence of the
genre came at the tail end of one of the most exciting centuries in
the history of the world. All those things that had happened since
the invention of lithography came into force in the strange worlds
of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. We can certainly
look at those developments one by one, from the telegraph of
Samuel Morse in 1844, which fundamentally changed the way
news was gathered, to the creation of the telephone correspondent
by Charles Chapin on the eve of the twentieth century. What
started out as a collection of dots and dashes was available in real
language just over a half a century later.
During the Gilded Age, it seemed that every day would bring
a new invention to the world. Thomas Edison had not only cap-
tured sound on a wax cylinder, he had also experimented with
lighting city streets with something called electricity, and just for
good measure, he used his competitor’s invention of alternating
current in the world’s first electric chair. No one would make
more of an impact on the collection of news than an eccentric in-
ventor from Rochester, New York, named George Eastman,
whose invention of celluloid film provided a base for visual jour-
nalism and led to the creation of the motion picture. It also made
photography a critical player in the interpretation of important
events. Then along came Hearst and Pulitzer, who introduced
color in their Sunday supplements. The massive expansion of the
railway system gave newspaper owners and editors the impetus to
start seeing the country as one large media market, although it
would be many years before true national media would be in
place.
 P R E FAC E xv

Of course, one of the most critical developments was the lay-

ing of a transatlantic cable, which brought America to the world
and the world to America. The collapse of international obstacles
would give America yet one more impetus to play a major role on
the world stage. And the media would play host to the country’s
dreams and ambitions. They would indeed be the first witnesses to
history. Hearst and Pulitzer would be at the forefront of the drive
to make America a world power.
I have always been interested in storytelling. For the scholar,
the study of the Yellow Press is a gift in this respect. A number of
America’s better-known writers were journalists, some of whom
wrote in the late nineteenth-century scandal sheets. That commu-
nity included Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage
and Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Ambrose Bierce, a columnist for
Hearst on the West Coast, and Mark Twain, who needs no intro-
duction. They saw the Yellow Press as a tuition-free postsec-
ondary school in which they could hone their skills in their pur-
suit of literary excellence. It is little wonder that truth often
suffered in this kind of environment.
One must ask whether the world really needs another book on
the Yellow Press. In my view, the response is emphatically yes. It
is true that other scholars, such as Sidney Kobre, W. Joseph Camp-
bell, and Ted Curtis Smythe, have studied this subject phenome-
nally well. The stories have been told as to how Hearst and
Pulitzer ended up in New York and founded a newspaper culture
that, in many respects, continues to function to this very day. My
volume would have to be different. I was not going to compete
with the basic premise that these authors used in their respective
works. So, what is so different about this book?
First of all, it is not a narrative history, as are most other works
on the Yellow Press. It deals with the evolving culture of Victo-
xvi P R E FAC E

rian journalism in America and how that culture was both adapted
and shaped by the Yellow Press, as well as the impact that culture
had on twentieth-century media. There will be no recounting of
the specific events of the Spanish-American War, although the
reasons expressed for the war by New York journalists and the
impact of the press on this conflict will be told. Further, there will
be a discussion on the role of visuals in the age of the Yellow Press
because both Hearst and Pulitzer relied on illustrations in their
journals as a key means to reach their target constituencies. This
volume is intended to complement the fine work already under-
taken on the Yellow Press.
As with any form of investigation, there is always a sense of ex-
citement when one unearths material that could make a difference
in the study in progress. One such discovery was a collection of
speeches by Pulitzer and Hearst alumnus Morrill Goddard, deliv-
ered in the mid-1930s in New York City. This man, reputed to
be the founder of the Yellow Journalism genre, gave an impas-
sioned defense of his role over a series of six evenings. His com-
plicity, if you will, was no longer in doubt.
And then, there were the great artists. I had searched for works
by Homer Davenport, Walt McDougall, the man who kept James
Blaine out of the White House, and Bob Carter and other edito-
rialists on the films containing both The New York Journal and The
World New York. I found a memoir written by Davenport in 1910
in which he painfully described his firing from the Portland Ore-
gonian, an event that led him to take a train to San Francisco,
where he was eventually retained by the San Francisco Examiner;
that position, in turn, would lead to a job in New York, where he
would find fame and fortune with Hearst at The New York Journal.
And finally, there was Richard Felton Outcault, creator of the first
 P R E FAC E xvii

comic strip, TheYellow Kid, which some believe gave Yellow Jour-
nalism its name. Outcault worked for both Hearst and Pulitzer be-
fore creating Buster Brown, a comic character who later became
synonymous with children’s shoes of the same name.
In the year and a half that this study took, I felt I had personally
gotten to know all of these characters. At the same time, friends
became more like strangers during this period, though they were
very tolerant of my work. Without their support together with
that of my wife, Judi, my colleagues at the University of Western
Ontario, and David Abrahamson, this volume would have been
far more difficult to complete. Enjoy the read.
D avid R .Spencer
 ONE

INTRODUCTION

When dismembered human remains floated to the surface of New

York City’s East River in June 1897, the publisher of The NewYork
Journal, a young, devil-may-care college dropout named William
Randolph Hearst, decided that his newspaper would beat the
city’s police department—the self-proclaimed “finest”—in dis-
covering the culprit or culprits who had perpetrated this heinous
crime. Pulling out all the stops, Hearst’s Murder Squad, a group of
investigative reporters, uncovered not only the identity of the
murderer but also a sordid extramarital affair involving the guilty.
The lurid descriptions of the untimely demise of a bathhouse
masseur that appeared in The New York Journal pushed the limits of
both credibility and social acceptability in those times. In a stroke
of opportunism, the Yellow Press had been born.
For Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and scores of other editors and re-
porters across urban America who worked in the newspaper in-
dustry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crime
reporting was a godsend. It tugged at the emotional heartstrings of
readers, and its violence and often graphic descriptions of the fate
of the deceased touched sensitive nerves in those who advocated

1
2 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

quick dispatch for individuals accused of such misdeeds. As histo-

rian Joy Wiltenburg recently observed, “Representations of crime
influence people’s conceptions of their lives and communities far
out of proportion of the actual incidence of criminal activity.” Lit-
tle has changed over the past century and a half. Crime reporting
was not the only avenue traveled by what would soon be called the
sensationalist press, but it was undoubtedly the trendsetter for tales
involving political corruption, sexual deviance, and other forms of
thuggish behavior. But as we shall see in the story to come, Hearst
and Pulitzer were only following a tradition that had begun to take
shape some three centuries previously. It was not a tradition that
was consequence free.
In most respects, the owners and editors who perfected the Yel-
low Press were creatures of their time and space. They lived in one
of the most technologically productive centuries in human history,
one that accelerated the new, soon to be literate world that had
been born with the invention of movable type. Although not the
only catalyst that propelled the evolution of the press into a signif-
icant player in a free-market society, the role of technology can-
not be ignored. The first major invention that later became incor-
porated in the nineteenth-century press was lithography, the
creation of one Alois Senefelder in Germany in 1798. Although
visual images were rare in the daily newspapers until the rise of the
Yellow Press, they were frequently used in specialized magazines
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Of course, not all
publications followed the techniques laid down by lithographers,
who used polished limestones with ink based in oil to create a pub-
lishable picture. However, the invention of lithography gave rise
to the concept that visuals could be part and parcel of storytelling,
which in the hands of the Yellow Press left little to the imagina-
 INTRODUCTION 3

tion. By the time that Hearst and Pulitzer went to circulation war-
fare in the late years of the century, American journalism was a
battleground of both words and images.
By the 1870s, unlike the practice in the early years of the cen-
tury, pictures were no longer produced by an engraver sitting at a
desk and working his tools into a slab of virgin wood. News was
being captured on celluloid film, the invention of a Rochester,
New York, eccentric named George Eastman. Coupled with the
invention of halftone reproduction, photography became a pow-
erful addition to a Gilded Age journalist’s arsenal. Hearst, Pulitzer,
and their imitators all exploited photojournalism shamelessly in the
late 1890s and early 1900s.
Like many other inventions that came to light in the same pe-
riod, photography had no single inventor. It was as much the cre-
ation of the Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niepce and Louis Da-
guerre as it was of the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot.
When Talbot published a collection of twenty-four pictures in his
book The Pencil of Nature between 1844 and 1846, it would only
be a short fifteen years before photographers were capturing the
carnage of the War between the States almost as it happened.
Virtually every technological advance that American inventors
could create finally found its way into the collection and distribu-
tion of news. We need not account for each one in detail, but let
it be said that it is doubtful that Melville Stone of the Associated
Press (AP) could have exerted the same influence on American
publishers without having the telegraph in the AP’s bag of good-
ies. It does not take a serious stretch of the imagination to realize
the impact of Richard Hoe’s rotary press when it entered the
newspaper world in 1847. And to all these marvels of the century
can be added the motion picture, the Linotype, paper production
4 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

based on wood as opposed to rags, recorded sound, and the first

static crackling of radio sound waves in precisely the same years as
the Yellow Press rose in New York City.
But the rise of the Yellow Press must be seen as something well
beyond the emergence of new technologies. As much as these in-
ventions gave publishers and editors opportunities they could only
dream of in the previous century, it was a set of ideas, philosophies,
and concepts, deeply rooted in American life, that determined the
behavior of the Yellow Press. In fact, the very role of the newspa-
per in the late nineteenth century came under a microscope both
by those who were entertained and informed by the extravagances
of the day and by those who were critically offended that such dis-
taste could actually appear and flourish in one of the world’s great
democracies. It is a battle that continues to this very day.
The debates that would finally result in the First Amendment
began, as did the use of sensationalism, long before the daily press
became an economic linchpin in America’s ever-growing urban
environments. Frederick Siebert and his colleagues at the Univer-
sity of Illinois were convinced that the press in the Victorian age
evolved from an essentially authoritarian model prevalent before
the eighteenth century to one of virtually unlimited freedom to
exercise what it saw fit, a condition that Siebert and his fellow au-
thors called libertarianism. It was an age of great excess, one that
eventually inspired new definitions of the press based on social re-
sponsibility that rose at the end of the Gilded Age in reaction to
the Yellow Press.
Both the casual observer and the more clinically inclined scholar
will recognize the influence of three major thinkers in Siebert’s
conceptions of the role of the press in late Victorian America. With
no respect to order or influence, they are John Milton, Thomas
Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill. In rethinking Siebert’s philosoph-
 INTRODUCTION 5

ical approach, media scholar John Nerone noted that none of the
three could be accused of holding any form of rabid libertarian be-
liefs, although he observed that Mill is more often than not placed
in that kind of ideological straitjacket. Certainly, one might be
tempted to add Alexis de Tocqueville to the mix.
It is undoubtedly safe to say that John Milton had no concep-
tion of anything like the Yellow Press when he rose in the Puri-
tan Parliament in 1644 to make a passionate plea against press
licensing. Milton was far more interested in promoting spiritual
salvation than defending freedom of the press. However, he was
concerned with the kind of moral issues that appeared in print in
his day and continue to the present age. His argument was based
on the belief that practicing Christians needed to be exposed to
various forms of theological impurities in order to distinguish be-
tween good and evil. Although theological issues did not appear
with any great frequency in the press world of the late nineteenth
century, readers of the Yellow Press were bombarded on a daily
basis with graphic and ghastly tales of murder, incest, poverty, in-
fidelity, corporate fraud, and any number of imagined or real evils.
In concert with the reader of Milton’s age, these consumers of
news were often faced with real and parallel dilemmas of a moral
nature.
As much as Milton saw the press in the role of social purifier,
Thomas Jefferson believed that a free press, along with accessible
public education, was critical for the health of a democratic soci-
ety. Writing to Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816, Jefferson
argued:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civiliza-

tion, it expects what never was and never will be. The func-
tionaries of every government have propensities to command at
6 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe

deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be
safe with them without information. Where the press is free and
every man able to read, all is safe.

Yet the press of Jefferson’s day was still deeply entrenched in the
process of paying homage to various political leaders and their or-
ganizations, if for no other reason than survival. Nonetheless, the
groundwork was being laid for a press literally without borders.
In his most famous political treatise, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
argued that “the time it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any de-
fense would be necessary for the liberty of the press as one of the
securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.” Mill pointed
to the great press prosecutions of 1858 as a symbol of a continuing
political maturity in the press in Great Britain. Although disap-
pointed that the government had swooped down on a number of
journals that opened a dialogue on tyrannicide, the author was re-
lieved that the discussions regarding those political institutions
seen to be a part of the debate were not involved in the prosecu-
tions. In addition, he was pleased that the government eventually
decided to drop the case and leave the press to its own wiles.
In many ways preceding Mill but following Jefferson, Alexis de
Tocqueville made many of the same arguments, placing the press
at the center of a democratic society. Yes, freedom of speech was
to be a treasured part of any liberal concept of the state, but de
Tocqueville was also interested in examining the role that news-
papers took in the establishment of communities. As he stated,
“There is a necessary connection between public associations and
newspapers: newspapers make associations and associations make
newspapers.” It is within this concept that the Yellow Press will
be situated in this study.
 INTRODUCTION 7

Nonetheless, one must not overstate the importance of the press

in creating associations. As historian David Paul Nord observed,
the press does not create associations by itself. What it does is de-
liver the information to constituencies capable of using that infor-
mation to build their own communities or, in modern parlance,
interest groups. Pulitzer’s appeal to newly arrived immigrants with
at most a scattering of English is, in one sense, a good example of
the interplay between the press and one of its constituencies. In
many respects, the Yellow Press, as we shall observe in upcoming
chapters, provided glowing examples of community constructions
before moving from an approach based on conversation and the
exchange of facts and ideas to what media theorist James Carey
referred to as “a model of information,” which, for him, was a far
from positive move.
In many if not most ways, the Yellow Press was a classic exam-
ple of the newspaper genre Frederick Siebert described as libertar-
ian. In his rethinking of the Siebert concept, John Nerone noted
that “the notion of the marketplace of ideas is central to liber-
tarianism’s model of political communication.” It is lodged in the
belief that the press can be an agent of change in which interest
groups, political parties, and religious organizations can vent their
beliefs in the press in the hope that other persons who share those
concepts can create what we have previously noted as communi-
ties. The concept is based in the idea that readers are rational and
can make rational choices. In every respect, the marketplace of
ideas that drove the Yellow Press was not that different from the
economic marketplace that drove late Victorian industrial society.
The press world of the late Victorian age was characterized not
only by the vicious circulation wars undertaken by Hearst and
Pulitzer but also by a further division in practice between elite ed-
itors and those in the Yellow Press, whose approach to journalism
8 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

was not considered to be objective. James Carey saw these two

positions as a conflict between what he termed a model of infor-
mation and a model of conversation. And, as noted earlier, by the
outbreak of World War I, the model of information dominated
the practice of the daily press in America.
Carey’s assessment of the behavior of the press can be seen in
its need to conquer space and exercise control over the flow of
information in the constituency it purports to serve. Carey called
this concept, which I have simplified to a significant degree, the
transmission model. Of course, this model is far from exclusive in
dealing with the press in general and is not specifically targeted in
Carey’s thought to the Victorian press of the late 1890s. But to a
large degree, it can work with the newspaper scholar in the never-
ending attempt to rationalize both how the news was delivered
and what news managed to get delivered. As Carey noted:
If one examined a newspaper under a transmission view of com-
munication, one sees the medium as an instrument for dissemi-
nating news and knowledge, sometimes divertissement, in larger
and larger packages over greater distances. Questions arise as to
the effects of this on audiences: news as enlightening or obscur-
ing reality, as changing or hardening attitudes, as breeding cred-
ibility or doubt. Questions are also raised concerning the func-
tions of news and the newspaper; does it maintain the integration
of society or its maladaption? Does it function or misfunction to
maintain stability or promote the instabilities of personalities?

As we shall see, these issues manifested themselves in various forms

and actions as the nineteenth century progressed. But for now, we
need only look to Carey’s second mode of interpretation—that
which he named a ritual view of communication, an idea more
 INTRODUCTION 9

closely related to the concept of the press as a vehicle for

conversation:
The ritual view of communication, though a minor thread in our
national thought, is by far the older of these views—old enough
in fact for dictionaries to list it under “archaic.” In a ritual defini-
tion, communication is linked to terms such as “sharing,” “par-
ticipation,” “association,” “fellowship,” and “the possession of a
common faith,” . . . a ritual view of communication is directed
not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the
maintenance of society in time; not the act of importing infor-
mation but the representation of shared beliefs.

In the final analysis, Carey saw news as a form of culture that was
created by the middle class beginning in the eighteenth century.
The kind of news that emerged in the late nineteenth century was
the inheritor of processes put in place by its predecessors. But in
Carey’s assessment, as the century passed, the ritual approach to
news treated it not as pure information but as high drama. Unlike
the transmission view of communication, news in the ritual sense
does not relate events in the world as fact influenced by fact but as
struggles between opposing forces and the actions that they take.
Carey reminded us that this sits within a historical period in which
participants were invited to become activists and take on social
roles as an outgrowth of press agitation. As we will see, the Yellow
Press came closer to a ritual interpretation than a transmission one,
although its need to conquer the spaces in which it lived cannot
and must not be dismissed as illegitimate.
One cannot separate the rise of the industrial urban complex
from the growth of the newspaper industry as an industry in the
closing years of the nineteenth century. The cylinder press, the web
10 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

press, the Linotype, and the stereotype were all influential in bring-
ing about massive increases in production of the daily newspaper.
In 1887, American newspapers could produce forty-eight thousand
copies of an eight-page newspaper per hour. A short five years later,
this volume had increased to ninety-six thousand pages per hour.
Smaller communities living on the periphery of larger urban
centers were often absorbed into the bigger metropolitan entity,
with the consequence that their specific identities were either re-
duced to some form of historical curiosity or forgotten altogether.
The more fortunate communities, while surrendering economic
and often political independence, retained some aspects of self-
governance. But in the final analysis, their newspapers and their
openings to a larger world were determined not in their own
backyards but by press denizens a short commuting distance away.
So it remains for us to discuss precisely what kind of reading
material was being fed to a public that was increasingly literate and
increasingly fascinated with virtually all forms of the printed word.
Journalism became the mode through which authors on both sides
of the Atlantic were able to sustain themselves by writing through-
out the nineteenth century. In Great Britain, Charles Dickens
made his mark as a contributing journalist, as did the radical wall-
paper designer William Morris. They happened to have arrived on
the literary scene when the business of patronage by royal and
noble households was on its last legs. In the United States, union
organizer Eugene Debs appeared regularly in print, as did Samuel
Clemens (better known to his readers as Mark Twain), Henry
James of Turn of the Screw fame, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow; America’s poet, Walt Whitman, made
regular appearances as well. It is easy to understand why story-
telling, in contrast with pure fact reporting, was the predominant
literary style in the American press until the Yellow Press turned
 INTRODUCTION 11

the concept on its head, which in turn contributed to its ultimate

decline.
As much as the nineteenth century was a period of intense tech-
nical innovation, it was also the backdrop to an elevated form of
social turmoil that would radically transform Victorian society and
the newspapers that depended on it for their continued existence.
When Whitman, the poet of America, died in Camden, New Jer-
sey, in March 1892, he was carried to his last resting place by the
reformist Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, on one
side of the coffin, and American freethinker and self-proclaimed
atheist Col. Robert Ingersoll, on the other. The funeral service
was punctuated by readings from Whitman’s classic Leaves of Grass,
interspersed with passages from Confucius, Buddha, the Koran,
and the Bible. Organized religion as it was known in the late Vic-
torian age was coming to an end, as were other linchpins of the
closed and smothering social system. The Yellow Press, always
conscious of its need to tell the best of stories unimpeded by minor
problems created by fact, would be there to do what it did best—
excite the soul and sell newspapers. Both the content and the style
that appeared in the journals run by Hearst and Pulitzer would
open wounds within the profession, primarily dealing with the
abstract notion of objectivity.
Two major issues emerged in the world of journalism as the
penny press gradually became the daily and very commercial press.
One was the debate over professionalism, the other the continuing
argument regarding objectivity. Journalism, like most other forms
of activity, had both its respectable and its not-so- respectable ac-
tors. And like those many other forms of activity, journalism
tended to be identified with its less-than-savory elements. Propo-
nents of disseminating all the news that was fit to print were more
often than not forced to defend that approach when someone pub-
12 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

lished all the news that was not fit to print. Needless to say, the ex-
cesses of the Yellow Press were embedded more in the public mind
than in the fact-driven pages of the New York Times.
To the uninitiated, the Victorian reporter could only be found
on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. News workers were
hardly a glamorous lot. They were rough. They drank too much.
They cheated on their wives if they were married. If they were
single, most would have suffered through multiple divorces. They
would never let any moral questions stand in the way of getting a
good story. They were not to be trusted. They were usually over-
worked and badly compensated. But on the odd occasion, they
rose to the surface to expose graft, corruption, and deception in
the highest of places.
Representative of this group were the reporters who appeared
in Ben Hecht’s classic but frantic screenplay and Broadway play
called The Front Page, which first appeared in 1928 and later
emerged under a number of different names, including the 1940
film edition, His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Rus-
sell. Hecht was well positioned to describe the life of the “typical”
reporter, since he had covered crime and corruption in Chicago
after dropping out of the University of Wisconsin. Like many oth-
ers, he had humble beginnings. Before joining the Chicago Journal
and later the Chicago Daily News, he had worked as a circus acro-
bat in Wisconsin. After being sent by the Daily News to cover
events in Berlin in 1912, he became a fixture at the reporters’ wa-
tering hole at the Adlon Hotel. Hecht was known to hold court
until the wee hours of the morning, often playing the piano while
his comrades emptied bottles of cognac, scotch, and numerous
Rhine wines while puffing on exotic European cigarettes and Ha-
vana cigars. Not quite so romantic were the characters who ap-
 INTRODUCTION 13

peared in Fred Fedler’s historical analysis of the role of reporters.

Their watering holes were a hop, skip, and a jump from their
places of work and the dingy boardinghouses many called home.
Drinking and working was a way of life to many a reporter who
would never see Europe.
While laborers and skilled artisans formed trades unions to fight
for their rightful place in the new industrial world of America,
journalists, among others, were beginning to debate how they
could improve their status both materially and spiritually. The
word profession began to appear in the odd document as a prelude
to wider debates on the politics of uplift. Other professionals, es-
pecially those in medicine, had formed self-governing societies in
which there were strict rules for membership. Only the qualified
could enter. And more important was the fact that these profes-
sionals could write the rules of their existence by themselves and
for their peers without undue interference from the authorities.
That very concept would prove to be the downfall of the notion
of professionalism for journalists. Unlike physicians and teachers,
who regarded themselves as members of a much larger entity in
which values were shared, journalists have never been known to
be communal.
It was Pulitzer, ironically, who made the first mainly public ges-
ture to bring the concept of professionalism to journalism and
journalists. The publisher of The New York World had attempted to
donate a considerable sum of money to New York’s Columbia
College in 1892, with a view to establishing a journalism school
on the campus. The administrators at the school had rebuffed his
attempts even though he was a member of the city’s social regis-
ter. As one of the two most identifiable persons associated with the
raucous Yellow Press, Pulitzer was an outcast and a social leper,
14 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

not to be included with the more “respectable” gentry in New

York—a group that included J. P. Morgan, William Rockefeller,
and John Jacob Astor, among others.
Pulitzer, in spite of the editorial approach of his newspaper,
always believed that an effective and efficient journalism was crit-
ical to a giant democracy such as the United States. With this in
mind, he constantly wrestled intellectually with the problem of
standards in the profession and the best ways to incorporate them
in a journalistic culture. He was of the opinion that excellence
could be encouraged if the right persons were hired to be jour-
nalists and properly trained in standards that governed the en-
deavor, which he believed were linked to the question of
professionalism.
In the summer of 1902, he approached the president of Colum-
bia, Nicholas Murray Butler, with an offer to fund the establish-
ment of a journalism school that would recruit well-known jour-
nalists and ambitious and skilled students. To upgrade the existing
practices in the field, Pulitzer offered to fund a series of prizes in
his name for journalistic achievement. Butler was intrigued with
the offer but was well aware that The World and its publisher were
not held in overly high esteem by the academics at Columbia. He
did not reject the offer outright but agreed to take the matter under
consideration. Pulitzer was also facing contemptuous remarks from
his colleagues in the field who believed that journalists were born
and could not be created, a viewpoint that continues to infect some
newsrooms to this day.
In the spring of 1903, Pulitzer upped the ante by increasing the
gift to $2 million. The next stumbling block that faced The World’s
owner was the reluctance of Butler to have the president of Har-
vard University on the proposed school’s advisory council.
Pulitzer insisted that Charles W. Eliot be included. He finally lost
 INTRODUCTION 15

patience with the affair and told Butler to accept or reject the offer
as it stood. Butler surrendered, and journalism became a fixture at
Columbia, with a mandate to improve and inspire the profession
as it entered the twentieth century. Interestingly, Columbia was
not the first postsecondary institution to offer education in jour-
nalism. Cornell had offered a certificate in journalism as early as
1874, and in 1893, the University of Pennsylvania offered a degree
program in journalism. Following Columbia’s lead, other postsec-
ondary institutions founded journalism programs, which remain in
significant number in the United States and around the world. But
alas, Pulitzer’s dream of a self-governing profession never took
root in the same way it did in teaching, medicine, and the acad-
emy. And journalism continues to attract derision as a field popu-
lated by gossips, fearmongers, charlatans, and sensationalists.
Mark Twain once referred to the daily press as the “palladium
of our liberties,” a key player in the promotion and preservation
of democracy. As well, he argued that the publication of news-
papers was the first step in creating a national focus on advanced
literature, which he also regarded as vital in developing a high cul-
ture. He winced and complained when some members of New
York’s robber baron upper class, such as Jay Gould, showed an in-
terest in bringing newspapers into their kind of capitalist world. In
an essay entitled “The License of the Press,” Twain offered his
reservations on what he termed the new journalism, which we
may term Yellow Journalism. Specifically, he was upset that some
journals in this genre had attacked religion and that these attacks
“had made scoffing popular.” Scoffing, indeed! What Twain was
really complaining about was what we would now called a lack of
objectivity.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the process by which
news was delivered to a consuming public had strong parallels in
16 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

the ancient art of storytelling. But in the mid-1860s, the seeds of

destruction of the genre had been planted with the invention of
the inverted pyramid. The adoption of the inverted pyramid, no
matter whose version of its invention one may accept, was based
on the concept that the most important aspect of news delivery
was tied to facts and that somehow or other those facts were not
tainted with personal agendas. Further, some facts were more im-
portant than other facts, and the facts with the greatest importance
should be those first read by the newspaper consumer. There were
those who believed that the increasing use of telegraph sources,
which rose significantly in the 1860s, created a news culture that
depended more on fact than on fiction.
As Mark Twain noted, the Yellow Press seemed to stand in
perfect conflict with those who advocated the collection of facts
and the diminution of storytelling. A sophisticated public deserved
no less, according to the critics of the Yellow Press. Ted Smythe
observed:
The Yellow Journalism of the late 1890s was a product of hyper
sensationalism and competition between Pulitzer and Hearst. It
was New Journalism carried to an extreme. Headlines were
larger and bolder and scare heads attracted readers. Illustrations
no longer reflected reality. They were designed to supplement
the scare heads, wow readers and get them to buy newspapers
and to talk about the World.

Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, newspapers had joined

the world of capitalism, for better or for worse depending on one’s
perspective. The journalism of the closing years of the century was
becoming part and parcel of the world of marketing, in which
business practices became essential for profit making and, in some
cases, survival. Companies buying advertising space wanted to
 INTRODUCTION 17

know to whom they were appealing, and as a consequence,

circulation figures had to be published and verified. A whole new
middle industry—advertising—rose in most major metropolitan
centers in the country, with agencies where trained persons were
paid commissions to place advertisements in prominent news-
papers. It was at this period in history that the department store
and the journalism industry forged a partnership that was to last
well into the closing years of the twentieth century.
In its simplest form, objectivity was regarded as the reporting of
news in which the facts that appeared on the printed page were
totally separated in terms of human value from the person who
collected those facts and assembled them for newspaper con-
sumers. In this concept, then, the reader was given the task of an-
alyzing and assembling facts gleaned from the daily press to form
his or her own worldview, or, as we saw earlier, the potential cre-
ation of communities. Yet the difficult question remained: can
anyone’s value structure remain independent of the facts one col-
lects? It is hard to imagine that a reporter brought up in a middle-
class and relatively affluent environment would not allow the
value systems accompanying his or her upbringing to at least filter
some of the facts. And of course, the same could apply to persons
from other backgrounds.
As media scholar Michael Schudson observed, the quest for
objectivity in a business designed to bring in income and show a
profit is “a peculiar demand to make of institutions which as
business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic sur-
vival.” Certainly, any concept of objectivity took a back seat in the
editorial rooms of Hearst’s NewYork Journal and Pulitzer’s NewYork
World in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In fact, it was
difficult to separate the news from the news makers. Both papers
took up causes, beginning with Pulitzer’s exploitation of Nellie
18 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

Bly’s “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” an exposé of conditions in a city

asylum for women, and eventually involving Hearst’s ambitions
for high political office. Neither publisher even pretended that ob-
jectivity was a goal to be achieved. Intervention into the various
aspects of New York life, by contrast, was a goal to be achieved
and not denied, and it was not. As media theorist Marshall
McLuhan concluded: “Real news is bad news—bad news about
somebody; for months without a newspaper, the chief of police
said, ‘Sure, I miss the news but so far as my job goes, I hope the
papers never come back. There is less crime around without a
newspaper to pass around the ideas.’”
In the final analysis, it was the reporter who provided the filter
through which much of the world arrived at the various kinds of
social visions created in the age of the Yellow Press. It was never
value free. As historian Hanno Hardt wrote: “Media work focuses
on the construction of realities and helps maintain the institutional
power of the media; it involves the labor of journalists, among
others, who are hired to perform to the expectations of their bosses
and in the name of freedom of the press.”
 TWO

T H E I N H E R I TA N C E

As with all historical phenomena, the exact origins of the condi-

tions that brought about in the Yellow Press are difficult to deter-
mine. However, one factor does stand out—namely, the integra-
tion of the concept of freedom of the press and the ability to
survive in a newspaper marketplace that, throughout the nine-
teenth century, became more and more integrated with the mar-
ket economy emerging before the Civil War. As a consequence,
boundaries that had been defined by political power brokers and
their fellow travelers underwent various severe tests. As editors
sought to expand their influence and increase their respective cir-
culations, stories that would not have appeared in a previous era
took root in the contemporary one. Gradually, the press evolved
from being a servant of the political structure to one of its harsh-
est critics. Commentary that would have, at the very worst, landed
a newspaper editor in jail or, at the very least, resulted in the loss
of the business began to become commonplace, especially during
the 1830s. As a result of one significant incident in eighteenth-
century New York, the fear of retribution by persons maligned in
the press was significantly reduced.

19
20 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

Getting into trouble with the authorities was a journalist’s lot

in life until John Peter Zenger appeared on the scene in 1733. One
of his predecessors, a certain Benjamin Harris—founder, pub-
lisher, and editor of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts publi-
cation Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick—caught the
attention of the colonial governor when he issued the first volume
of his journal; in it, he gleefully related the shenanigans of certain
royal personages in Europe. Harris, who had a dubious back-
ground at any rate (having spent time in a British debtors’ prison),
often made his living selling splendid elixirs at county fairs, liquids
guaranteed to wipe out any number of maladies, both short-term
and terminal. His work as America’s first journalist hardly inspired
confidence in the craft. Yet his so-called exposé of wrongdoing at
the highest level would once again surface in New York City in
the mid-eighteenth century, and the legal processes that resulted
from it would impact journalistic practice to this very day.
Zenger entered the world of New York politics as an impov-
erished young European who had come to the United States
searching for new beginnings. He served an apprenticeship in a
print shop, saving enough money to buy his own press and set
himself up as both a printer and a part-time journalist. While
Zenger was seeking to make life easier for himself, one person
who did not have to suffer, Governor William Cosby of the New
York colony, found himself in a bitter battle with the colonial
council over a number of matters, most notably his salary, which
the council deemed excessive. Cosby ran headlong into a war with
the chief justice of New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature,
Lewis Morris. When Morris resisted Cosby’s pleas, the governor
responded by firing the chief justice and replacing him with one
of his cronies. The move did not sit well with many New York-
ers, particularly John Peter Zenger.
 T H E I N H E R I TA N C E 21

Zenger issued a pamphlet condemning the governor’s actions

and supporting Chief Justice Morris. He immediately attracted
support from the antiroyalist factions in New York, with the con-
sequence that he turned his pamphlet into a newspaper called the
New York Weekly Journal. His friend and legal adviser, James
Alexander, acted as editor and assisted Zenger, whose command
of English was anything but secure. The two decided to cover an
election in Westchester County in which Morris was running
against one of Cosby’s appointees. In spite of some interference
by the local sheriff, Morris won the seat handily. However,
Zenger and Alexander decided to lampoon the sheriff, whom
they described as a monkey. The assault did not go unnoticed,
especially when the tirade against the governor continued on a
weekly basis.
Zenger appeared to be in the clear when a grand jury, though
pressured by Cosby and his friends, refused to issue an indictment
for seditious libel against the journalist. However, the governor
was not one to give up, and eventually, the colonial administra-
tion issued its own warrant. On August 4, 1735, Zenger went to
trial. Much to the shock of Cosby, as well as his appointee, Chief
Justice Delancey, and several other hangers-on, the jury refused to
convict. The argument that truth was a defense against charges of
libel and slander had entered the law books.
The colonial authorities were unwilling to overturn a jury ver-
dict, knowing as they might the kind of social unrest such an ac-
tion could encourage. Although British law at the time and Amer-
ican law subsequently did not recognize jury verdicts as
precedent-setting, the case began to be used by defense attorneys
with some success. In 1742, Boston Evening Post journalist Thomas
Fleet used the truth-as-defense argument in a conflict with Sir
Robert Walpole. When William Parks of the Williamsburg Gazette
22 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

accused a politician of stealing sheep, he, too, was vindicated

because he was able to prove the charges were true.
So, what does all this have to do with the emergence of the
Yellow Press? Quite simply, when editors, publishers, and com-
mentators no longer feared that a stint in prison could follow a
damaging article, they began to explore the limits of public toler-
ance, all in a desire to accumulate readership that in turn would
result in higher circulations and thus higher financial returns. And
when the penny press began to appear on the streets of New York,
one could easily determine that matters such as political corrup-
tion, lurid crime, and financial skulduggery would find their ways
to the front page, and they did. The penny press would expand the
borders of journalistic culture in early nineteenth-century America.
The birth of the penny press took place in Boston on July 24,
1830. The event would change the course of American journalism
for all time to come. Its founder, Lynde M. Walter, a Harvard
graduate with few worries about income, entered a world that had
only begun to emerge from the relative instability of the eigh-
teenth century. In 1830, there were only 65 daily papers in the
country, supplemented by 650 weeklies. Population growth was
hardly explosive during the 1830s, increasing from 12.9 million to
only 17.1 million by the end of the decade.
The new penny press of the 1830s had little in common with
the primarily political press that preceded it, with the possible ex-
ception of some factors of physical form. Prior to the 1830s, many
newspapers were owned and operated by printers who also pro-
vided typographical services in order to make a living. These so-
called printer’s newspapers focused on events in Washington as a
primary activity. Suffering in this respect were the events in the
local communities around the nation, which sorely lacked local
news coverage.
 T H E I N H E R I TA N C E 23

John Nerone and Kevin Barnhurst have referred to news gath-

ering in the years prior to the 1830s as passive. Reporting had yet
to emerge as an essential player in newspaper culture. Editors and
owners seldom if ever wrote articles for their own journals. To a
large degree, content consisted of material pirated from other
newspapers, political news as noted previously, and correspon-
dence both written and oral from readers and local gossipmongers.
Needless to say, fact checking had also not yet entered the journal-
istic vocabulary.
Neither had the advantages of unique designs been explored. In
terms of form and style, one newspaper looked very much like an-
other. Publishers and owners were constantly struggling with cost
obstacles, to the point that most newspapers were quite small,
about the size of a standard sheet of modern typing paper. Even the
most important stories were often reduced to a few clinical lines.
As for the number of pages per issue, it was usually four. As
Nerone and Barnhurst observed, “The printer’s newspaper had
been a gentleman’s conversation about the colonial world and
then a citizen’s town meeting.” The rise of the penny press would
put this era to rest once and for all.
As a model for what would follow, Walter’s paper made a num-
ber of significant innovations that would eventually find their way
into the New York newspapers later in the decade. For one, he
increased the size of each page from 8.5 inches by 11 inches to 10
by 15. The face page was devoted to advertising, a tradition that
continued well through the nineteenth century and into the early
years of the twentieth. As opposed to some of his successors, Wal-
ter saw to it that the content of his Boston Transcript was usually in
very good taste, specializing in covering literature and theatrical
events. Although the journal itself was fairly conservative in its
outlook on life, Walter took it upon himself to defend Boston’s
24 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

largest minority, the boatloads of unkempt Irish immigrants who

were changing the very character of the city itself.
The penny press arrived in New York on January 1, 1833,
when Horatio David Shepard teamed up with Horace Greeley
and Francis W. Story and issued the Morning Post. Although both
Greeley and Story went on to fame and fortune in the New York
press world, the concept of bringing out a penny paper belonged
exclusively to Shepard. He made a habit of taking daily walks
through the teeming streets of the Bowery, where he observed
merchants selling small items for a penny a piece. He also took
note of the fact that sales were brisk. Shepard correctly sensed the
viability of the marketplace, a world the press would soon enter.
Of course, any item that sells for a mere penny or two is not
likely to attract an elite purchaser. Prior to the rise of the penny
press, only those with some sense of literacy and the financial
means that usually went with it could afford to subscribe to news-
papers in the Jacksonian era. Until the emergence of popular
newspapers, most journals depended on subscription rates of any-
where from $8 to $10 a year. The penny press reached well down
on the class ladder to a new constituency, one that would eventu-
ally be inherited by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
At the risk of simplifying a relatively complex issue, it can be
claimed that any form of anarchy that existed in the city’s streets
and neighborhoods supplied fodder for the press. The decorum
that was achieved by the polite relating of political tales was re-
placed by a hurly-burly, headlong plunge into a nether world in-
habited by crooks, murderers, petty thieves, and numerous per-
sons whose names regularly appeared on police blotters. As
historian James Melvin Lee noted, “The penny papers went on the
principle of what the Lord let happen ought to be printed in their
 T H E I N H E R I TA N C E 25

sheets.” Needless to say, the approach did not sit well on upper
Fifth Avenue.
Yet in many respects, the penny press became the laboratory in
which journalistic experimentation took place. A sense of compe-
tition started to take hold, with editors and publishers fighting it
out to see who could be first to report stories of significance.
Rather than just be the voice of various political leaders, the penny
press decided to take on the role of protector for those who could
not fend for themselves—the huge population of working-class
individuals who lived marginal existences in New York’s over-
crowded tenement slums. For the first time in the history of North
America, newspapers became totally integrated into the culture of
their respective communities. With the impact of the new indus-
trial age about to be felt, new technologies such as steam presses in-
creased the ability of publishers and editors to rapidly expand their
activities and increase the size and content of their journals. More
and more Americans were learning to read and write, creating an
ever-increasing constituency for the press. There was no looking
back.
The first penny press newspaper to make a quick impact was
Benjamin H. Day’s NewYork Sun. The opening issue was anything
but impressive. Day relied on past practice to design the paper and
determine its content. It was a four-page publication set upon 8.5-
by-11-inch pages with three columns of type. There was no sense
that something called original reporting should be done. This first
issue was cribbed from a number of existing New York dailies and
weeklies. Day mounted the first issue with one helper and two
printers.
Yet though the layout and design followed some predictable
patterns, the content did not. And when the New York market-
26 T H E Y E L LOW J O U R N A L I S M

place got wind of what Day was publishing, the circulation of the
paper jumped to four thousand copies a day. Readers could not
easily turn away from a story with the tantalizing headline
“MELANCHOLY SUICIDE,” which appeared on page two. The cen-
ter of reader attraction was the sad saga of one Fred Hall, who had
moved to New York from Boston. Apparently, the young
lovelorn man was rejected by his intended, with the consequence
that he took his own life with an overdose of opium. What made
him and his dilemma newsworthy was the simple fact that Fred
Halls existed everywhere in daily life in large, urban areas. What
made telling Hall’s story significant was the simple fact that for the
first time in its history, journalism turned its attention to the pre-
viously anonymous people who constituted the bulk of American
society at the time.
What Day learned from the Hall affair was that the seamy side
of life paid. In fact, so did crime. Preceding Damon Runyon by a
century or so, Day turned his attention to the police courts, whose
goings-on were directly related to his desire to hire more writers
to make sure that no good story was missed. Taking his cue from
a British newspaper called the London Morning Herald, Day treated
his readers to a continual parade of petty thieves, hookers, confi-
dence artists, homeless transients, and a host of others who had
shadowy connections on the wrong side of the law. Although Day
was probably not conscious of the fact at the time, his obsession
with covering police stories likely marked the first instance in
American journalism when the craft of reporting and storytelling
actually began. As Nerone and Barnhurst pointed out, two forms
of reporting culture began to take shape in the Victorian age. On
the one hand, there was the scavenger, who was “not a persona
but a completely anonymous news hound, combing first the ex-
change papers, then the police courts, the theatres and the taverns
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