From The Scoop: Yellow Kid Journalism?

From the April 28 issue of Gemstone Publishing's The Scoop:

 

Scoop was fortunate enough to receive this fascinating historical feature on The Yellow Kid from Richard Olson, Ph.D.

Joseph Pulitzer's The World and William Randolph Hearst's The New York Journal were fighting a bitter circulation war against each other in the late 1890s, and one key component of the battle was the Yellow Kid. Outcault drew the Yellow Kid for The World until Heart hired him away to draw the Kid for the Journal. Pulitzer countered by having George Luks, who would develop into one of America's most celebrated fine artists of the 20th Century, continue drawing the Kid for The World. The owner of each paper would do almost anything to sell his papers.

With the outbreak of fighting in Cuba, both papers sent journalists to cover what would become the Spanish-American War in 1898. The reporters had strict instructions to file sensational stories, which they did, using their imagination rather than fact, to create them. It wasn't long before the reporters from identified as from “The Yellow Kid Papers” as the fight between Pulitzer and Hearst was followed nationally and The Yellow Kid only appeared in those two papers in the days prior to syndication of comic strips like Buster Brown.

The reporters themselves were disparagingly referred to as “Yellow Kid Journalists.” Most academicians today think that the next step in the evolution of the pejorative identification of those reporters' stories was to refer to them as “yellow journalism,” a term that is still used today to refer to a sensational story that might not be based totally on facts.

Recently contributor Richard Olson obtained a copy of the Omaha Daily Bee for Monday, 7 March 1898. On page 8 was an article about the Reverend E. Trumbull Lee rebuking the Yellow Kid papers in the headline and administering a sharp reprimand to Yellow Kid journalists in the narrative. With articles like this appearing throughout the country, it is easy to imagine how complaints were shortened to “yellow journalism” to give the term greater generalization in applying to any outlandish story.

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