by David Nasaw
Will intended to get out his first issue before the talk had died down. Charles Palmer, his business manager in San Francisco who had come to New York to help him buy his newspaper, agreed to stay on; Sam Chamberlain also agreed to move to New York to become managing editor. Hearst telegrammed to San Francisco to order Winifred Black, who as “Annie Laurie” had become his most famous reporter, Homer Davenport, the Examiners chief illustrator and cartoonist, and Charlie Dryden, the lead sports writer, to take the next train East. They spent the first two days on the train speculating about why Hearst had sent for them, Black recalled in a later magazine article:
It all seems so simple now. But at that time we had no more idea of a Hearst newspaper in New York than we had of one established at the top of the mountains of the moon. When we reached Omaha, Dryden came into the car, and his face was as white as a sheet.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “The Chief’s bought a New York paper. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have stirred a step.”
“Neither would I,” said Homer Davenport, who had left his young wife and a brand-new baby at home in San Francisco.
But of course that was all nonsense. We would have gone to the Fiji Islands or to Greenland's icy mountains if the Big Chief had wanted to send us to either of those probably delightful but rather remote places.
On arriving in New York, Black and her comrades discovered to their dismay that the daily Hearst had purchased was the Morning Journal, which, as Black remembered it, was “not much of a paper. ‘The Chambermaids’ Own,’ they called it.”10
The common opinion, according to the cartoonist Walt McDougall who worked at Pulitzer’s World, was that Mr. Hearst would fail very quickly: “Ridiculed for his youth and assurance, condemned as a gross voluptuary, sneered at as a rich man’s son rushing in where angels feared to tread ... he was both pitied and jeered when it leaked out that he had bought the... Journal”11
Hearst was not only convinced that he would succeed, but expected to do so as extravagantly as he had in San Francisco. His strategy was simple, and given the competitive situation in New York, probably the only one possible. He decided to keep the price of the Morning Journal at a penny, but give readers as much news, entertainment, sports, and spectacle as Joseph Pulitzer’s World, Bennett’s Herald, and Dana’s Sun provided for twice that price. At a penny a paper, it would be a long time before his revenues caught up with his costs, but he was convinced that if he gave New Yorkers a full-sized paper for a penny, they would flock to it.
Pulitzer had pursued the same course on entering New York in 1882. At that time, the city’s only two-cent paper was Dana’s Sun, but it offered its readers only four pages for that price. Pulitzer gave them eight and often twelve. His circulation doubled in four months. By the time the Times and the Herald reduced their price to two cents, Pulitzer had already attracted enough loyal readers to make his paper a success.
Hearst, like Pulitzer before him and like other mass marketers in the entertainment industry, expected that his low-priced strategy would pay off in a huge audience. He was prepared to sacrifice revenues while he built his circulation base by putting out the biggest and best paper available for half the price of the competition. Stump had put aside a quarter million dollars of Phoebe’s money to upgrade the Morning Journal. Hearst spent it on new presses and a new staff.
On November 7, 1895, a month after buying the paper, Will Hearst published the first issue of his New York Journal with the “morning” dropped from the title to create a more striking logo. While the news printed that first week was rather pedestrian, the illustrations were spectacular—as they would continue to be for the life of the newspaper. On November 8, the front-page story on the marriage of magazine artist Charles Dana Gibson, the creator of the Gibson Girl, was illustrated with a beautifully rendered drawing of Gibson and his bride. The following Sunday, New Yorkers were greeted by their first front page of Hearstian proportions. Over an all but full-page drawing of two lugubrious criminals ran a large-type bold headline, with several layers of subheads beneath it:
LIGHT BREAKS THROUGH AT LAST. A Gang of Criminals Who Travel From Place to Place to Kill and Rob. Police are Now Prepared to Deal With a Most Startling Condition. The Morrisania Murder is Similar to Crimes Committed in Hoboken and Baltimore. Many Arrests Have Been Made. George Parker and Raymond Elroy, Lodging House Waifs, Locked Up at Police Headquarters for Further Identification in the Future.
In the middle of the page was a related article, again with an illustration: “The Man of the Hour, How Captain O’Brien, the Celebrated Detective Who Has Succeeded Inspector Byrnes, Regards the Two Men Under Arrest on Suspicion.” At the bottom was an almost life-size drawing of a revolver and bullet. Two men had been arrested on suspicion of murder. That was all that had happened. We don’t know what became of the two because the story was not covered by the other dailies and vanished from the Journal as miraculously as it had appeared. Still, for that one day New Yorkers were drawn to Hearst’s paper, if for no other reason than to find out what these drawings of criminals, police detectives, and a revolver and bullet added up to.
To spread the word that a new paper had arrived in town, Hearst advertised the Journal with the flair of a vaudeville impresario. He hired bands and, week after week, papered the city with colored posters—on billboards, elevated trains, streetcars, and wagons—announcing the contents of next Sunday’s Journal.12
Judging from some of the stories run on the front page, he had still not given up his dream of replicating the contents of the Herald and publishing a paper with sufficient news of “society” to attract the city’s more prosperous residents. On November 12, 1895, he covered his entire front page with the “text” of a letter from Lord Dunraven who complained—at enormous length—of “fraud” in the America’s Cup yacht race. For the rest of the week, there were front-page stories about scandals at the horse show. Then, on November 16, in the space on the important right-hand side of the front page that had been given over to horse-show news, he reverted to type and, following the pattern he had established in San Francisco, led with a spectacular crime story: “HELD AT BAY BY A MANIAC. Shot His Mother and a Housekeeper, and then Killed a Man. City of Montpellier, France Startled by an Extraordinary Crime.”
The Journal had found the formula it would build on for the future. The front page would from now on be filled with stories about New York society set alongside articles about terrifying crimes against ordinary folk. On November 19, a slow day for news, the Journal carried page-one stories about striking construction workers, the rush of settlers into the Northwest, the America’s Cup race controversy, and two innocent boys who had been “KILLED BY HYDROPHOBIA ... Both Lads Barked and Snapped Like Dogs, Suffering Terrible Agonies. Little Ralph, in His Struggle Bit Through His Tongue and Lips Again and Again.”
On November 24, Thanksgiving, the entire front page of the New York Journal was devoted to an exclusive report on the Harvard-Yale football game by Richard Harding Davis, perhaps the best known and most expensive journalist in the country. According to his biographer Arthur Lubow, Davis had no desire to write about a football game, but was unwilling to give Hearst a flat no and demanded “the preposterous sum of five hundred dollars. To his astonishment, the young publisher accepted his terms at once. The figure was generally said to be the highest sum ever paid to a reporter for an account of a single event. Hearst, however, got his money’s worth ... The edition sold out.”13
Day after day, Hearst and his staff improved on their product. Their headlines were more provocative than anyone else’s, their drawings more lifelike; the cartoons by Homer Davenport were sharply focused and brilliantly drawn, the writing throughout the paper outstanding, if, at times, a bit long-winded. Equally important in attracting new readers, the paper’s layout was excellent, with text and drawings breaking through columns to create new full-page landscapes, and sensational bold headlines that seized the eye and quickened the imagination.
The m
easure of a commercially successful newspaper is not simply how well it reports the big events, but what it does when there are no dying statesmen, bloodthirsty desperadoes, or heinous crimes to write about. Hearst succeeded in New York not only because he knew how to report the big stories, but because he was a master at constructing news from nothing. News is not a phenomenon that exists in the real world, waiting to be discovered. Wars have been fought, tornadoes have raged, and hundreds of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered without ever becoming “news.” An event becomes news only when journalists and editors decide to record it. More often than not, what determines whether an occurrence is newsworthy or not is the ease with which it can be plotted and narrated so that readers will want to read about it. If there are no discernible heroes or villains, no mysteries to uncover, no climaxes, denouements, triumphs or failures, if no one wins or loses in the end, then there is no story to tell.
Hearst’s favorite news stories were front-page tragedies of conspiracy in which the public was the innocent victim, the police and city officials the corrupt villains, and the Journal reporters the brave heroes. It was with stories like these that he would make his mark. Like Pulitzer in the 1880s and James Gordon Bennett in the 1840s, he aimed to make his newspaper stories as engrossing and entertaining as they were informative. He did this by seeing to it that the stories were illustrated with dramatic line drawings, highlighted with bold, slashing headlines, and told in the style of minimelodramas of daily life in the metropolis. On December 9, 1895, to take but one example, he converted what would ordinarily have been back-page filler about a young woman arrested for soliciting, and plotted, illustrated, and headlined the story into a place on the front page. Under a five-column-wide line drawing captioned “Lizzie Schauer and Some Types of the Professional Criminals With Whom She Has Been Forced to Associate,” he presented the opening of his melodrama, in which poor, innocent Lizzie Schauer was forced to spend an evening in jail with a particularly sordid collection of miscreants. The happy resolution came the following day. Under a headline that read “The Liberation of Lizzie Schauer,” the Journal reported how it had rescued Miss Schauer “from the workhouse where she had been committed by City Magistrate Mott on a charge of soliciting in the street.”
Hearst was not content with challenging Pulitzer, Bennett, and Dana in the morning. He intended to compete with them on Sundays as well. The Sunday papers, packed with advertising and overstuffed with features, were the most profitable element in newspaper publishing. Here, as with his morning edition, Pulitzer was far ahead of his competitors with a Sunday circulation of 450,000. A key element in Pulitzer’s success was his brilliant editor, Morrill Goddard, the pale, thin Dartmouth graduate who had virtually invented Sunday supplement journalism with spectacular pseudoscientific articles on “The Suicide of a Horse; Cutting a Hole in a Man’s Chest to Look at His Intestines and Leaving a Flap That Works as if on a Hinge; Experimenting with an Electric Needle and an Ape’s Brain; and Science Can Wash Your Heart,” as well as fully illustrated stories of exotic murders and murderers, “Real American Monsters and Dragons,” and scandals involving men of wealth in tuxedos and chorus girls in underwear.14
Instead of attempting to find a Sunday editor to compete with Goddard, Hearst made the man an offer he could not refuse. When Goddard hesitated because he was reluctant to desert the staff he had built at the World, Hearst hired them as well. Pulitzer, learning of Hearst's coup, authorized Solomon Solis Carvalho, his publisher, to bring Goddard back to the World. Carvalho contacted Goddard with a new offer, Goddard accepted it, and returned to the World for twenty-four hours, until he received Hearst’s counter-counteroffer. Pulitzer was left with an empty office and one stenographer. Even the office cat, it was reported, had defected to Hearst.
Pulitzer, who was now almost completely blind, immediately left his home in Lakewood, New Jersey, for New York City, where he presided over an all-night meeting with S. S. Carvalho and John Norris, the World’s business manager. After Arthur Brisbane, who had been working on special projects, was named to succeed Goddard, Pulitzer, with Carvalho and Norris in tow, departed for his vacation home on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to draw up war plans.
Though Hearst was still losing money, the circulation of the Journal was now approaching 150,000, less than the World's but rapidly gaining on it. By the time the three men reached Philadelphia, they had decided that the best way to destroy Hearst and the Journal was to drop the price of the World to a penny. No New Yorker in his right mind would buy Hearst’s Journal when, for the same penny, he or she could have Pulitzer’s World.15
The decision was made hastily and would turn out disastrously. In dropping the price of his paper, Pulitzer played directly into his young competitor's hands—as years before James Gordon Bennett, Jr. had played into Pulitzer's when he cut the price of the Herald to kill off Pulitzer's World. Hearst reacted brilliantly. In an editorial on February 10 entitled “An Unwilling Convert,” the Journal welcomed the World to the ranks of the penny papers, the “true” journals of the people. Pulitzer's move to one cent had, as The Fourth Estate announced on its front page a few days later, energized Hearst, who was “not unaccustomed to fighting and rather enjoys the excitement of strife.... Both [Pulitzer and Hearst] are abundantly supplied with the sinews of war, and the struggle promises to be interestingly bitter.”16
Smelling blood, Hearst moved in for the kill. He had convinced Phoebe and her cousin Edward Clark, now her chief financial adviser, that he knew what he was doing. Though he had long before spent the quarter of a million dollars that had been set aside to upgrade the Journal, his mother continued to grant him loans which she entered in her ledger books as notes to William R. Hearst. Either she expected him to repay the loans or, more likely, was keeping track so that she could cut him off when he had gone through the half-portion of the estate which was morally, though not legally, his.17
With the bravado of a marauding Western bandit, Hearst used the money he got from his mother to ruthlessly strip Pulitzer of his remaining talent. The week before Pulitzer’s editor, Richard Farrelly, was to be honored at a birthday celebration to mark his elevation to managing editor at the World, he defected to Hearst. In April, S. S. Carvalho, the World’s publisher, resigned to become Hearst’s editor in chief. He would remain a Hearst editor and a member of his inner circle for the next thirty years, until he was in his eighties. Austere, unsmiling, with a goatee that made him look like an El Greco portrait, Carvalho provided the juvenile, flamboyant publisher with the ballast he needed. He became Hearst’s right-hand man, just below him on the unwritten organizational chart.18
Town Topics, the society gossip sheet that was awash with anti-Semitic tirades against Pulitzer, took enormous pleasure in Hearst’s victories. In early April 1896, it recounted the story of Richard Farrelly’s defection in great detail: “How is Mr. Pulitzer to get unleavened bread when the young Egyptian from San Francisco is getting all the dough?” Two weeks later, Town Topics joked that Mr. Hearst would soon be attacked by labor organizations as a “monopolist of talent. Whenever he sees a brilliant intellect sparkle, he wishes to wear it on the bosom of the Journal. ... He is perfectly willing to pay people for buying his paper, and he is still more willing to pay people for writing for his paper, and all the citizens of Great New York, or eventually all the citizens and aliens and Indians of full age in the United States, have either got to take the paper or write for it.”19
While the accepted opinion was that Pulitzer’s editors and reporters deserted to Hearst because he offered them outrageously high salaries and bonuses, insiders knew that there was more to the defections than mere money. Pulitzer had become an impossible man to work for, a nasty, vituperative, foul-mouthed martinet. Blind, and so sensitive to sound he had to eat alone lest he be disturbed by a dinner companion’s biting on silverware, Pulitzer had abandoned New York but had been unable to settle down anywhere else. He wandered between his homes in Bar Harbor, Maine; Jekyll Island, Geor
gia; Lakeside, New Jersey; and Cap Martin on the French Riviera. Incapable of managing his papers at close hand, but unwilling to let go, he interfered at a distance, making it impossible for his chief editors and business managers to do their jobs. Because he believed he could get the best out of editors by putting them under battlefield conditions, Pulitzer continually moved people from job to job, hiring new editors to sit in judgment over old ones, changing or confusing the responsibilities of staff members so that there were no clear lines of authority and everyone had to look to him for instructions. The result was constant backbiting, feuds, and chaos.
Hearst had no doubt learned this much about Pulitzer from Ballard Smith and John Cockerill, two of the many World editors Pulitzer had victimized. As Will had told The Fourth Estate in October of 1895 when he arrived in New York City, he intended to do things differently at his newspaper. He would not pursue what he referred to as “the metropolitan idea of hire and fire,” because he had “seen enough of the damage done to feel that ... it is not well for a paper seeking good men to have them fear that they are taking big chances in leaving secure positions for shaky ones.” To persuade experienced newspapermen to join a venture everyone was convinced would fail, Hearst had to offer more than big salaries. He had to guarantee security in the form of large multiyear contracts. This was, for the newspaper industry at least, almost unheard of. Until Hearst appeared on the scene, there had been no job protection for editors or reporters, no matter what their reputations.20