Pulitzer fled the poverty of Hungary by signing up to serve in the U.S. Union Army during the Civil War. His first few years in the U.S. followed a path taken by many other immigrants. He struggled, got conned, made a little money, lost some, too, got into a gunfight, then joined a group of people in St. Louis, Missouri who saw something in him and in his writing. This is where Pulitzer’s story veers off the beaten track and leads to his extraordinary success.
He got involved in politics and bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch. The newspaper’s reporting already had a reputation for the sensationalism that came to be called yellow journalism. As Pulitzer competed with other newspapers, he pushed his editors and writers to go further. Stories had to be dire to the point of melodrama. Innuendo and fabrication became acceptable, then desirable. Pulitzer took this style to the New York World, the newspaper he bought and turned into a juggernaut of yellow journalism and profitability.
Describing his outlook on publishing the news, Pulitzer said, “The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking, something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience.” When he died in 1911, his net worth was nearly one-tenth of one percent of the entire U.S. Gross National Product. Pulitzer left millions of dollars to Columbia University to create a graduate-level journalism school that taught and recognized professional reporting, not sensationalism.
Joseph Pulitzer, circa 1900 Image source: PBS
“Every reporter is a hope, and every editor is a disappointment.”
-Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, born on this day in 1847
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