Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [913]
He got it. When he took over in 1883 the World was selling perhaps fifteen thousand copies a day. It passed the sixty thousand mark in a matter of months. The Herald, Times, and Tribune, acting like rival railroad magnates, slashed their prices to keep up, but to no avail. Within a scant two years the World’s circulation topped 150,000, and in 1890 Pulitzer capped his triumph by erecting the world’s tallest building.
Pulitzer succeeded by navigating the course charted back in the 1830s by those master pilots of the penny press, Bennett Senior and Benjamin Day. He also seized on the possibilities of the 1880s: the industrialization of communications technology, the techniques developed by the advertising business, and the strategies deployed by the mass entertainment entrepreneurs on Coney Island, the Bowery, Broadway, and Union Square.
The World adopted a breezy and colloquial style. “Condense, condense!” Pulitzer commanded his reporters, following admen in opting for the simple nouns, vivid verbs, and short sentences that made the paper accessible to immigrants learning the language. When chastised by E. L. Godkin of the Evening Post for breaking with genteel conventions, Pulitzer replied: “I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee.”
World news stories scrapped leisurely chronology for snappy analysis, putting the who-what-when-where-and-why into an easily graspable lead paragraph. This, together with smaller pages, was a boon to hurrying commuters, explained a trade paper in 1887, as New Yorkers “read largely in the horse cars, the elevated railroads and the omnibuses”—crowded and noisy venues. “We do not want a paper which requires a whole conveyance in which to turn its pages.”
Pulitzer reformatted the front page. Even penny press papers like the Herald and the Sun had stayed with single-column headlines, simply adding subheads to denote particularly important stories. The World went with multicolumn banners that contemporaries likened to department store displays designed to grab shoppers’ attention.
He plunged into pictures. Graphics had long been central to weekly magazines and illustrated papers like Frank Leslie’s, and in 1880 the New York Daily Graphic had supplemented its zinc etchings and photoengraved line illustrations with the first halftone photograph ever reproduced in a New York newspaper, a picture labeled “Shantytown.” But in the regular daily press, it was Pulitzer who first routinely deployed images to accompany text—an enhancement that, like bold heads and terse prose, appealed to the barely or recently literate. He also furthered the development of cartoons (the Daily News had run a strip since 1884) and broke new ground in 1894 with the first colored comic strip—also, curiously, called “Shantytown.” This was followed by the introduction of “Hogan’s Alley,” featuring a hairless, single-toothed street urchin dressed in flowing yellow robes. The “Yellow Kid” would be spun off as a strip in its own right.
Pulitzer’s content, like his style, appealed to a mass audience. Immediately on assuming control, he had called his inherited, dignified staff together and announced: “Gentlemen, you realize that a change has taken place in the World. Heretofore you have all been living in the parlour and taking baths every day. Now I wish you to understand that, in future, you are all walking down the Bowery.” This unnerving prospect prompted several on-the-spot resignations, allowing Pulitzer to bring in replacements from his St. Louis paper.
Pulitzer, like Harrigan and Hart, drew on working-class life for material. The World chronicled ordinary people, using human interest stories to spotlight and dignify members of the metropolitan crowd. Pulitzer’s reporters routinely quoted the kind of New Yorker who had rarely appeared in print before, like the gashouse laborer who had just learned of the existence of Central Park and attended a Sunday concert there: the World passed on to the world his remark