About New York World

New York World

The New York World was a daily newspaper published in New York, New York, from 1860 to 1931. It played a major role in the history of American newspapers as a leading national voice of the Democratic Party, and from 1883 to 1911, under publisher Joseph Pulitzer, it became a pioneer of yellow journalism, capturing readers with sensation, sports, sex and scandal and pushing its daily circulation to the one-million mark. It published Nellie Bly's undercover reporting and her race around the world, it built the tallest office building in the world as its home, it printed the first crossword puzzle, and in 1931 its Pulitzer heirs sold it and it was merged into the New York World-Telegram, ending the original World after seventy-one years.

The World's history fell into three parts: a struggling and sometimes disreputable first two decades under editors and financiers who used it for political and stock purposes, the Pulitzer era that made it one of the largest and most innovative papers in the world, and a distinguished but financially declining final twenty years under Pulitzer's sons and editors.

Founding and the Manton Marble Years, 1860 to 1876

The World was founded in 1860 by Alexander Cummings, who had previously founded the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, but it did not prosper in his two years as publisher. From 1862 to 1876 it was edited by Manton Marble, who was also its proprietor, and under Marble it became a Democratic voice in a city whose great papers divided sharply over the Civil War and Reconstruction.

During the 1864 presidential election the World was shut down for three days after it published forged documents purportedly from Abraham Lincoln, an episode that also involved a notorious hoax about miscegenation that nearly damaged Lincoln's campaign. Marble, disgusted by the defeat of Samuel Tilden in the disputed 1876 presidential election, sold the paper after that election to a group headed by Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Scott, Gould and a Paper Used for Finance

Scott used the paper as a propaganda vehicle for his stock enterprises, but he was unable to meet its growing losses, and in 1879 he sold it to financier Jay Gould as part of a deal that also included the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Gould, like Scott, used the paper for his own purposes, employing it to help him take over Western Union. He could not turn its finances around either, and by the early 1880s it was losing about $40,000 a year, with a circulation of only about fifteen thousand when Pulitzer bought it.

Those years mattered because they showed what the World was without an editor-publisher committed to the newspaper itself: a valuable name and plant in Manhattan that powerful men treated as an instrument. Pulitzer, who had built the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after buying and merging St. Louis papers in 1878, saw in the failing World the New York opportunity he wanted, and in 1883 he bought it from Gould for a price reported as $346,000.

Joseph Pulitzer and Circulation Building After 1883

Joseph Pulitzer bought the World in 1883 and began an aggressive era of circulation building aimed at immigrants and working readers whom the established papers courted less energetically. He emphasized illustrations, advertising and a culture of consumption for working men, believing, as historian Janet E. Steele argued, that such readers saved to enjoy life with their families, at Coney Island for example, and wanted a paper that spoke to that life. By contrast, Charles A. Dana of The Sun was portrayed as holding a more traditional view of the working man as engaged mainly in a struggle to better his conditions. In time the more sensational approach to news, advertising and content triumphed.

The World backed campaigns as circulation devices and as civic causes. After a heat wave in 1883 killed a disproportionate number of poor children, it published stories about tenement conditions with headlines about lines of little hearses, and its coverage spurred action in the city for reform. Its most famous civic campaign raised money from ordinary citizens to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, binding the paper's name to the statue's arrival in the public mind.

Nellie Bly and Investigative Spectacle

Reporter Nellie Bly, whose real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, became one of America's first investigative journalists in the World's pages, often working undercover. Her exposure of conditions in an asylum, for which she feigned insanity to be committed, became a landmark of undercover reporting. As a publicity enterprise for the paper, inspired by Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days, she then traveled around the world in seventy-two days in 1889 and 1890, beating the fictional record and making her name and the World's inseparable in popular memory.

Bly's work exemplified Pulitzer's mixture: a stunt that sold papers, executed with genuine reporting nerve, and directed at institutions that mistreated the powerless. The World applied the same mixture to tenement abuses, corruption and crime, accepting the charge of sensationalism from established publishers who resented its courting of the immigrant classes, while insisting that sensation could serve exposure.

The World Building, Color Printing and the Yellow Kid

In 1890 Pulitzer built the New York World Building on Newspaper Row, at the time the tallest office building in the world, a tower whose dome announced that a newspaper for immigrants had outbuilt its respectable rivals. The building became the paper's headquarters and a symbol of its ambition until after the paper's death.

In 1896 the World began using a four-color printing press and was the first newspaper to launch a color supplement, which featured Richard F. Outcault's Hogan's Alley cartoon and its Yellow Kid character. The World was one of the first newspapers to publish comic strips, starting around 1890, and it contributed greatly to the development of the American comic strip, originating or carrying strips including Hogan's Alley, The Captain and the Kids, Everyday Movies, Fritzi Ritz, Joe Jinks and Little Mary Mixup, and syndicating features nationally through its World Feature Service from about 1905.

The Circulation War with Hearst and Yellow Journalism

The color supplement and the Yellow Kid helped ignite a circulation battle with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which hired away talent and imitated and intensified Pulitzer's methods. The battle gave rise to the term yellow journalism, derived from the Yellow Kid, for the sensational style both papers practiced at their most unrestrained, and the two papers were widely blamed for inflaming opinion before and during the Spanish-American War, whose news, including the World's 1898 coverage of Admiral Dewey's victory at Manila Bay, it sold in enormous editions.

The war had costs at home. In 1899 Pulitzer and Hearst were the cause of the newsboys' strike of 1899, when the boys who sold the papers struck against higher wholesale prices; the strike led to Pulitzer's circulation dropping sharply, by some accounts seventy percent at its worst. Charles Chapin, hired in 1898 as city editor of the Evening World, embodied the era's ruthlessness: he embraced the sensational, controlled the newsroom with an iron fist, fired more than a hundred newspapermen during his tenure, and was still called by Stanley Walker the greatest city editor who ever lived. His time at the World ended when, after financial ruin, he murdered his wife in 1918.

Frank Cobb, Editorial Independence and Pulitzer's Death

Pulitzer hired Frank Irving Cobb as editor of the World in 1904 on a trial basis. Cobb, a fiercely independent Kansan, resisted Pulitzer's attempts to run the office from his home, and the two supported Woodrow Wilson while disagreeing in many other areas. Pulitzer issued a carefully worded resignation notice in 1907, which his son Ralph, who took over administrative responsibility, respected Cobb for not publishing in the World itself. In May 1908 Cobb and Pulitzer met to outline a consistent editorial policy, and Pulitzer's demands led to Cobb being sent on a six-week European tour to restore his spirit. Shortly after Cobb's return, Pulitzer died in 1911. Cobb finally published the 1907 resignation and maintained the editorial policies they had agreed until his own death from cancer in 1923.

Pulitzer's will and example also left a larger legacy beyond the paper: he endowed the Pulitzer Prizes and the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, institutions that carried his name long after the World itself had closed, and that defined professional honor in the field his newspaper had done so much to sensationalize and to elevate.

The Swope Era, Columns, Crossword and the Klan Exposé

When Pulitzer died in 1911 he passed control of the World to his sons Ralph, Joseph and Herbert. The paper continued to grow under executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope, who hired writers such as Frank Sullivan and Deems Taylor. Its noted journalists included Franklin Pierce Adams, who wrote The Conning Tower column, Heywood Broun, who penned It Seems to Me on the editorial page, and the future hardboiled fiction writer James M. Cain. Walter Lippmann also worked at the World in that era.

The paper published the first crossword puzzle on December 21, 1913, billed as a Word-Cross Puzzle, a novelty that became a permanent feature of American newspapers. The annual reference book The World Almanac, founded by the newspaper, carried the World's name into homes that never bought the daily. In September 1921 the paper ran a twenty-one-article series exposing the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan, starting September 6, one of the most celebrated newspaper exposés of the decade and a demonstration that the Pulitzer tradition of crusading survived its founder.

Sale and Closure on February 27, 1931

By 1931 the World's circulation was about 313,000, respectable in isolation but insufficient against its costs and against the Depression and its New York competitors. Pulitzer's heirs went to court for permission to sell the World, and a surrogate court judge decided in their favor. Roy W. Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain purchased the paper to eliminate its competition. He closed the World and laid off its staff of 3,000 after the final issue was printed on February 27, 1931, and then merely replaced the word Evening on his afternoon paper, the Evening Telegram, renaming it the New York World-Telegram.

The World's most popular comic strips were brought over to Scripps' United Feature Syndicate with the acquisition of its syndication assets, so features created by the World survived the newspaper. The World Building outlived the paper as well, and the Almanac continued under the World name.

Legacy and the Columbia Revival of the Name

The World's legacy was held in the institutions and forms it created: stunt and undercover reporting in the Bly tradition, color comics and the crossword as newspaper staples, the Statue of Liberty pedestal campaign as a model of reader fundraising, the Klan exposé as a model of serial investigation, and the Pulitzer Prizes themselves. Its yellow period remained the standard cautionary example of circulation war carried to excess, taught alongside the crusades as two faces of the same aggressive method.

On May 16, 2011 Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism announced that it was launching an online publication named The New York World in honor of the original newspaper published by Joseph Pulitzer, who had founded the school, to provide accountability journalism about government operations affecting New York City citizens, staffed mainly by graduates of its master's and doctoral programs. That online publication focused on data journalism and collaborated with other outlets, but it did not publish new content after 2016. The original World, the daily that had defined an era of New York journalism, remained defunct, its run complete from 1860 to 1931.