Journalism has evolved along two separate schools of thought. The first is reporting with dignity and scrupulous attention to fact and detail; the other caters to more basic human instincts and “livens up the news.”[i] The latter is tabloid journalism.
It was discovered early on that news is more financially successful when it plays off of the reader’s emotions.
In the 1830’s the New York Sun and Herald started selling papers at one cent a copy (from the usual six cents). The writing was also changed to appeal to a lower class, less literate audience.[ii]
About fifty years later, Joseph Pulitzer made the next step in sensationalism with Yellow Journalism. He presented news in a more exciting and provocative manner.[iii]
In competition for readers with Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst caused the United States to go to war with Spain, with shock value stories of Spanish atrocities. He is famously quoted saying, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”[iv]
Tabloids first appeared in London in the 1890’s. It was an innovation to make reading a newspaper easier for commuters by cutting the page length in half. The Daily Mirror, created by Alfred C. Harmsworth surfaced as the first successful tabloid.[v]
Tabloids had been tried and proved unpopular in North America; but during World War One, Harmsworth met Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson and convinced him that New York needed a tabloid. Patterson took the idea to his partner at the Tribune, Col. Robert R. McCormick and published the Illustrated Daily News.[vi] It became the first popular tabloid in North America.
In 1922 Bernarr MacFadden started to experiment with sensationalism with a new magazine called Midnight. It featured images of almost naked women and verged on obscenity. It was also completely fictional, but extremely popular.
Midnight didn’t last long. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice arrived with a summons to MacFadden and his staff, but agreed to serve it as long as Midnight shut down immediately.[vii]
Two years later MacFadden returned with the New York Evening Graphic. A newspaper that sensationalized, dramatized and fictionalized the news. It was not popular, advertisers avoided it and New Yorkers called it the Porno-graphic”[viii] It was too low brow even for tabloid fanatics.
Hearst, meanwhile, was bankrolling the New York Enquirer. And used it to test new ideas – popular ones made it into his other papers, unpopular ideas did not. During the 1930’s the Enquirer favoured a German-American unity until World War Two broke out. It disappeared for awhile and then reappeared as a sports paper.[ix]
The Enquirer was bought in 1952 by Generoso Pope Jr. He turned it into America’s first national tabloid, The National Enquirer.[x]
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[i] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 17
[ii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 18
[iii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 19
[iv] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 23
[v] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 23
[vi] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 25
[vii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 26
[viii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 27
[ix] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 28
[x] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 28
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