Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that is to say, up to about 1880, most newspapers, even in our large cities, were conducted on the theory that the best news a paper can print is a death notice or marriage announcement.
Up to that time the newspapers had not yet begun to break into the tenements, and most people who supported a newspaper lived in homes rather than in apartments. The telephone had not yet come into popular use; the automobile was unheard of; the city was still a mosaic of little neighborhoods, like our foreign-language communities of the present day, in which the city dweller still maintained something of the provincialism of the small town.
Great changes, however, were impending. The independent press was already driving some of the old-time newspapers to the wall. There were more newspapers than either the public or the advertisers were willing to support. It was at this time and under these circumstances that newspaper men discovered that circulation could be greatly increased by making literature out of the news. Charles A. Dana had already done this in the Sun, but there still was a large section of the population for whom the clever writing of Mr. Dana’s young men was caviar.
The yellow press grew up in an attempt to capture for the newspaper a public whose only literature was the family story paper or the cheap novel. The problem was to write the news in such a way that it would appeal to the fundamental passions. The formula was: love and romance for the women; sport and politics for the men.
The effect of the application of this formula was enormously to increase the circulation of the newspapers, not only in the great cities, but all over the country. These changes were brought about mainly under the leadership of two men, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
Pulitzer had discovered, while he was editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, that the way to fight popular causes was not to advocate them on the editorial page but to advertise them—write them up—in the news columns. It was Pulitzer who invented muckraking. It was this kind of journalism which enabled Pulitzer, within a period of six years, to convert the old New York World, which was dying of inanition when he took it, into the most talked about, if not the most widely circulated, paper in New York City.
Meanwhile, out in San Francisco Mr. Hearst had succeeded in galvanizing the old moribund Examiner into new life, making it the most widely read newspaper on the Pacific Coast.
It was under Mr. Hearst that the “sob sister” came into vogue. This is her story, as Will Irwin told it in Collier’s, February 18, 1911:
Chamberlain (managing editor of the Examiner) conceived the idea that the city hospital was badly managed. He picked a little slip of a girl from among his cub reporters and assigned her to the investigation. She invented her own method; she “fainted” on the street, and was carried to the hospital for treatment. She turned out a story “with a sob for the unfortunate in every line.” That was the professional beginning of “Annie Laurie” or Winifred Black, and of a departure in newspaper writing. For she came to have many imitators, but none other could ever so well stir up the primitive emotions of sympathy and pity; she was a “sob squad” all by herself. Indeed, in the discovery of this sympathetic “woman writing,” Hearst broke through the crust into the thing he was after.
With the experience that he had gained on the Examiner in San Francisco and with a large fortune that he had inherited from his father, Hearst invaded New York in 1896. It was not until he reached New York and started out to make the New York Journal the most widely read paper in the United States that yellow journalism reached the limit.