John Singer Sargent's portrait of Joseph Pulitzer
For years, Joseph Pulitzer couldn't make Columbia take his two million dollars. He wanted to build a journalism school, and Columbia wanted to maintain its self-respect.
Creating a profession
But if journalism was hardly seen as a profession for a gentleman in those days (and certainly not one for a lady) that was in part Pulitzer's doing. The Hungarian-born immigrant had taken over the World -- the New York World -- in 1883 and set about revolutionizing newspapers with techniques some admired as the "New Journalism" and others dismissed as the "Yellow Press." His cheap and lively paper soon attracted an enormous readership by combining some radical innovations -- comics, a separate sports department, lots of pictures, a fat Sunday edition -- with the old reliable journalistic standby of sensationalism. You could always find plenty of crime, disaster, and sin in the World, plenty of screaming headlines, plenty of titillating stunts like sending Nellie Bly undercover into an insane asylum.
Pulitzer's passion
What made the World unique however wasn't really the yellow hue; William Randolph Hearst's rival Journal was even more colorful. It was Pulitzer's passionate belief that journalism was a public service, and by the public he meant the little person, not the great powers. In his first issue he announced that the World would be "truly democratic, dedicated to the cause of the people rather than to that of the purse potentatates."
His full-throated editorial pages were the true heart of the paper, and he crusaded against the robber barons and railroads and oil companies, against corrupt politicians and brutal policemen, for decent working hours and humane living conditions for the poor. He wanted lively, vigorous reporting, certainly -- once, when he feared the paper was getting stodgy, he decided the problem was that no one on the staff got drunk, and he told a staffer to go out, find a man who did, and hire him at once. But he demanded that even the liveliest reporting be accurate reporting, too, and he defended his paper against the charges of sensationalism by arguing that he wanted to talk "to the nation, not to a select committee." That he did.
A vision of the future
As Pulitzer neared the end of his life he mellowed the yellow of his paper and devoted more and more of his energies to improving the profession, advocating the education of journalists and the establishment of prizes to encourage and recognize excellence. His vigor and sincerity finally persuaded Columbia, but by the time the doors opened at the Journalism School in 1912, the "greatest journalist on earth," as one contemporary called him, was dead.
by Andie Tucher
|
RSS