International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The term “yellow journalism” first emerged in the United States as a pejorative to characterize the news produced by publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in their competition for New York City readers during the late 1890s. Their success in achieving daily circulations surpassing one million helped spread their innovations, including →  sensationalism , to other newspapers. With Pulitzer and Hearst, the US news industry joined that of other industrialized democracies at the turn of the century, including Sweden, Germany, Canada, and England (with the Northcliffe revolution), in evolving from a limited “class” press to a “mass” medium. These mass newspapers adopted varying proportions of sensationalism, populism, and socialism to address the interests of new, urban, working-class, and immigrant readers. In response, the established upper-class journals fought back on matters of taste and politics, in part by disputing the legitimacy of the new journalism and castigating it as yellow (→  Newspaper, History of ). During the late 1800s, two factors altered the economic strategies of US news publishers. First, the cost of paper stock continued a long-term fall from approximately 12 cents a pound in 1860 to 2 cents in 1900. Second, advertising revenues rose drastically, first from display ads for department stores and later from name brands. US census data reports that ... log in or subscribe to read full text