The yellow press grew up in an attempt to capture for the newspaper a public whose only literature was the family story paper or the cheap novel. The problem was to write the news in such a way that it would appeal to the fundamental passions. The formula was: love and romance for the women; sport and politics for the men. The effect of the application of this formula was enormously to 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 _Collier’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 sympathetic “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. Pulitzer’s principal contribution to yellow journalism was muckraking, Hearst’s was mainly “jazz.” The newspaper had been conducted up to this time upon the theory that its business was to instruct. Hearst rejected that conception. His appeal was frankly not to the intellect but to the heart. The newspaper was for him first and last a form of entertainment.