Yellow Journalism

As technology accelerated communications during the last part of the 19th century, the role of the newspaper as a conveyer of opinion and news became more and more apparent. In the major cities of the United States there were newspaper wars, in which the papers used yellow journalism—colorful graphics and sensationalism—to compete for sales. The wars culminated in the late 1880s in New York, where Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst became the leaders of the era of yellow journalism.

In the race to see who could sell the most newspapers in a rather tight market, newspapers often relied on a niche market (for example, a particular ethnic group), or tried to be the first to break some new news item. For a newspaper to be truly effective, it had to develop a gimmick to draw in readers. In the fierce market of New York papers, this hook came in the form of “funny pictures.”

Yellow journalism had its foundations in new printing technology and reporting styles. To entice more readers, newspapers in the mid-1880s began to purchase printing presses that were capable of printing colored advertisements. Pulitzer produced the Sunday World, a Sunday edition of his paper the New York World, at a time when only ethnic papers published a Sunday edition. The new paper contained the news and features that regular readers were acclimated to, but it also contained book reviews, sections that appealed to women, and a Sunday comics section that appealed to all. The most famous artist of the new comic book section was William Outcault, whose cartoon Hogan's Alley featured a small toothless orphan that went on various adventures in New York. Because the new cartoon was printed in color, and the chief character was given a costume of a yellow nightshirt, he and the series became known as the Yellow Kid. The combination of a Sunday paper and the new features made Pulitzer's Sunday World an immediate sensation.

Hearst, who moved to New York after building up the San Francisco Examiner, took over the ailing New York Journal. He was in New York to challenge the dominance of Pulitzer's paper, as well as to expand his growing media holdings. He immediately began luring people away from the World, as well as bringing to New York some of the more famous people from the San Francisco paper.

It is ironic that for the men whose names are associated with professionalism in journalism (especially Joseph Pulitzer), the key to successful journalism was the use of sensationalism in reporting. Numerous lurid headlines were written on the most banal of subjects to entice potential readers to buy papers. Hearst went so far as to employ various freelance writers and columnists to draw in even more readers. Virtually any subject became fodder for scandalous angles or ideas. As more people read the papers, advertising revenue went up, and owners continued the cycle. By 1896, the World and the Journal were locked in a newspaper war that saw a million issues sold per day in New York. The circulation wars took part in other major cities as well, often involving papers owned by or aligned with papers owned by Hearst or Pulitzer.

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