The Yellow Press

Modern Journalism as we know it started in America in the 19^th century.  In the 1840s People from around the world were travelling to California, hoping to find gold in rich mines in what is now aptly known as ‘the Californian gold rush.  Life in Europe wasn’t much fun; poverty and war were causing people to seek a better life in the states.  The Irish were going through a pretty nasty famine, which encouraged a huge flux of migration to America.   

One of the early ‘gold miners’ was George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst. He allegedly won The San Francisco Examiner in a poker game and in 1887 passed it down to his son, William Randolph Hearst; one of the fathers of journalism as we know it today.  Before this time, newspapers were reasonably boring affairs, either used for political propaganda, or aimed at the upper classes and intellectuals. Hearst changed this, by removing large blocks of text, instead preferring large pictures, and attention grabbing headlines, the front page was everything to him. This gave him a larger, broader readership, including Americas newly acquired immigrants and people of a lower social standing allowing him to Purchase the New York Morning Journal.

The Morning Journal’s only real rival was The New York World, bought by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883, it regularly received a daily circulation of 1 million. There was a real circulation war between these two papers, who garnered the nickname, ‘the yellow press’ due to them both publishing the same cartoon ‘yellow kid’ for a year after a row regarding the ownership of it. Yellow press is still what we see in Newspapers today, with large catchy headlines, pictures and general sensationalism.

Tv is now beginning to kill of newspapers, circulation falling and falling, some don’t even make a profit anymore

1920s to present day.

Tabloid nation,

Baby boom – daily mirror taking the audience of those who didn’t have a tv and didn’t want to read a broadsheet.

Added Objectivity, before all too politically biased.

. News agenda also began to change around this time, crime and punishment always high on the agenda.