2008/06/05 by Richard L. Kaplan · 18 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Economic history #History #Journalism #Law #Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis #Media Studies and Communication #Media studies #Newspaper #Pejorative #Political science #Politics #Populism #Sensationalism #Sociology #Taste #Working class
paper · doi:10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecy001
published in The International Encyclopedia of Communication
openalex publication_date 2008/06/05 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
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).