formula was: love and romance for the women; sport and politics for the men.
The effect of the application of this formula was to enormously increase the circulation of the newspapers, not only in the great cities, but all over the country. These changes were brought about mainly under the leadership of two men, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
Pulitzer had discovered while he was editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch that the way to fight popular causes was not to advocate them on the editorial page but to advertise them—write them up—in the news columns. It was Pulitzer who invented muckraking. It was this kind of journalism which enabled Pulitzer, within a period of six years, to convert the old New York World, which was dying of inanition when he took it, into the most talked about if not the most widely circulated, paper in New York City.
Meanwhile, out in San Francisco Mr. Hearst had succeeded in galvanizing the old moribund Examiner into new life, making it the most widely read newspaper on the Pacific Coast.
It was under Mr. Hearst that the "sob sister" came into vogue. This is her story, as Will Irwin told it in Cottier's, February 18, 1911:
Chamberlain (managing editor of the Examiner) conceived the idea that the city hospital was badly managed. He picked a little slip of a girl from among his cub reporters and assigned her to the investigation. She invented her own method; she "fainted" on the street, and was carried to the hospital for treatment. She turned out a story "with a sob for the unfortunate in every line." That was the professional beginning of "Annie Laurie" or Winifred Black, and of a departure in newspaper writing. For she came to have many imitators, but none other could ever so well stir up the primitive emotions of sympathy and pity; she was a "sob squad" all by herself. Indeed, in the discovery of this symphathetic "woman writing," Hearst broke through the crust into the thing he was after.
With the experience that he had gained on the Examiner in San Francisco and with a large fortune that he had inherited from his father, Hearst invaded New York in 1896. It was not until he reached New York and started out to make the New York Journal the most widely read paper in the United States that yellow journalism reached the limit.
