Clash of the Titans - War of Words
News was a dull dry affair in the 19th century until these two men revolutionised how news was presented and consumed by ordinary people
József was born in Hungary as the son of a businessman who was well-known in the city of Makó. His father moved him to Pest and there he was educated by private tutors. His family was wealthy enough for his father to retire in 1853, just 6 years after his birth. In 1858, his father died and the businesses that were keeping them supplied soon went bankrupt. Staring at dire prospects József assumed the easiest work he could find was to fight for an army.
He attempted to enlist himself first with the Austrian Army, then the French and then the British. He was rejected by all of them. Finally, he was recruited in Hamburg to fight in the American Civil War in 1864. He was paid $200 to enlist in the Lincoln Cavalry and arrived in Boston.
After the war, he worked many odd jobs; first in the whaling industry and then as a waiter before he got his first break working for the Republican Party in St Louis. It gave him an insider view of the corruption that was rampant in the party. Disillusioned he decided to quit and do something about it.
He bought a bankrupt newspaper called St. Louis Dispatch, merged it with St. Louis Post, and created the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
Joseph Pulitzer started his career in the news on that day.
Pulitzer built a newspaper that was meant for the common man which highlighted issues that were more in line with the challenges that they faced. His circulation grew.
He quickly outgrew the city of St. Louis and set his eyes on New York, a much larger city. Also in the 19th century, newspapers were more like pamphlets meant to provide information and often propaganda. Having seen his set of struggles he set a different benchmark for what a newspaper was supposed to report.
He moved to New York and purchased a newspaper called the New York World. Here he would make his greatest contribution to News to date. He invented the…
HEADLINE
His focus on human interest stories and his reliance on highlighting the most interesting part in the form of a headline increased interest amongst those who came across the newspaper. They would be captivated by the headline and to learn more, they would end up buying the newspaper. Circulation grew rapidly and a newspaper that was selling 6000 units when he took over was soon selling as many as 600,000 copies a day.
Hearst
George Hearst was a wealthy miner who owned several mines in the Black Hills in South Dakota. His gold mines made him incredibly wealthy and he was politically quite active. Most of the newspapers in those days were started as propaganda machines and he owned one called the San Francisco Examiner.
His son William Hearst had been closely watching the rise of Pulitzer in New York and wanted to get in on the business. He asked his father to transfer ownership of the San Francisco Examiner which was doing rather poorly at the time. He soon began turning the newspaper around, using what later came to be known as Yellow Journalism. Typical tabloid daily with little concern for ethics and standards. The newspaper was willing to bend the truth so long as it got newspapers sold.
San Francisco was a small town out west at the time and Hearst soon set his eyes on New York. He used the enormous fortune that his father had left behind to good effect. He convinced his widowed mother to allow him to buy the New York Morning Journal in 1895, which was a failing paper in New York.
He brought his brand of yellow journalism to the city and circulation soon began expanding considerably. He also slashed the price of the paper by half compared to Pulitzer’s New York World
The Rivalry
Pulitzer did not want to fall to the level that Hearst was willing to, but he was also facing real heat in his business.
Hearst began recruiting Pulitzer’s best reporters. He had incredible wealth backing him and he was willing to spend whatever it took to compete with Pulitzer. Soon the news reporting quality at the New York Morning Journal began to improve and so did the circulation.
Despite the odds, Pulitzer was unwilling to compromise on the type of news that he was publishing in his newspaper and soon the business started to struggle to produce a profit. On the other hand, Hearst was pushing his circulation further and had crossed the 1 million papers per day threshold.
Hearst focused on the story of one Evangelina Cisneros who was being held captive by the Spanish in Cuba. Karl Decker who was a reporter at New York Morning Journal played a central role in enabling the escape of Evangelina from Cuba. This became an exclusive and further drove the growth of the newspaper.
At this point, the USS Maine was sunk off the coast of Cuba which was occupied by the Spanish. Hearst seized on the opportunity and called it an act of war against the United States. While Pulitzer tried to resist at first, he had to join the chorus, to not lose readership.
Within 2 months, the United States was at war with the Spaniards, known as the Spanish-American War.
Pulitzer was taking a hit on profitability each time circulation rose because of the price war he was engaged in with Hearst.
In 1899, to stop the bleeding he decided to go after the most disenfranchised in the system - the newsies. Newsies were boys who were usually in their teens who came from impoverished backgrounds and made a living by distributing papers. They would buy paper in bulk at a 50% discount and sell them. A paper then was selling at 1 cent and newsies would purchase 100 for 50 cents and sell them.
Pulitzer decided to increase his take to 60 cents and also refused to take back any of the papers that were not sold.
Hearst and Pulitzer were engaged in this intense rivalry where each had to follow suit when one made a decision.
This resulted in the Newsboy Strike of 1899. The newsies refused to deliver papers from either of the publications. Their circulations dropped by more than 60%. The strike lasted 2 weeks and represented this David vs Goliath struggle. Unable to take the bleed, Pulitzer finally wrote to Hearst asking him to join in offering the newsies the ability to return the unsold papers while retaining the 60-cent take.
Pulitzer could not absorb this continued wrangling with Hearst. His health began to deteriorate and he suffered from blindness as well as depression. He handed over the newspaper to an editor he hired in 1904 and eventually his son took over in 1907. In 1911, Pulitzer passed away listening to his German secretary read about King Louis XI of France.
In 1892 he encouraged the President of Columbia University to set up a school of journalism. He left the university $2 million in his will. In 1912, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was instituted and in 1917 the first Pulitzer Prize was organised.
In the meantime, Hearst expanded his newspaper empire covering several cities including Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. He also got into the magazine business launching Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar. He also set up the New York Daily Mirror in 1925.
All of the properties were rolled into what came to be known as the Hearst Corporation. It reached its heights in 1928. The depression wiped out a lot of value and he had to lose control of the company to keep it alive. He lived out the rest of his life in opulence and died in 1951.