Ervin Wardman, editor of the New York Press, coined the phrase yellow journalism in 1896 to connote the questionable journalistic practices employed by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in their fight for circulation and readership. Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895, which had been founded in 1882 by Albert Pulitzer (Joseph’s younger brother), and he was determined to surpass in popularity Pulitzer’s World, known for its lively news coverage, low-brow advertising, and civic mindedness. (The World for example had raised $100,000 to complete the base of the Statue Of Liberty.) Hearst began the war with copious illustrations; an emphasis on crime, disasters, and scandals; and abundant feature material that made the Journal distinctly sensational and in direct competition with the World. Hearst used his considerable wealth to practice “checkbook journalism.” He hired away the entire Sunday staff of the World and erected huge billboards and plastered blank walls with advertisements of Journal features. Circulation bounded upward and soon approached the numbers of the thriving World. The World responded in kind, and in their newspaper war both Hearst and Pulitzer focused on gossip, scandal, and crime and used questionable reporting techniques to gather as well as create news.
The rivalry came to a head with the papers’ Sunday editions; though fairly equal in circulation during the week,
Pulitzer’s World pulled ahead on Sundays with four pages of its eight-page comic section printed in color. The Journal began a similar section in 1896, heralding “eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe.” The pride of its Sunday comic section and readers’ favorite was the strip “The Yellow Kid,” drawn by Richard Outcault, whom Hearst had lured away from Pulitzer. Not to be outdone, Pulitzer hired artist George Luks to create a second “Yellow Kid” in the World, and the silly boy with the toothless vacant grin and yellow outfit soon symbolized the journalistic depths to which the two newspapers sank in their rivalry.
Further reading: David Nasaw, Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Scribners, 1961); W. A. Swanberg, Pulitzer (New York: Scribner’s, 1967).
—Ellen Tashie Frisina
World History
