Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
It was about the time the yellow press was engaged in extending the
newspaper habit to the masses of people, including women and
immigrants—who up to this time did not read newspapers—that the
department store was beginning to attract attention.
The department store is, in a sense, a creation of the Sunday newspaper.
At any rate, without the advertising that the Sunday newspaper was able
to give it, the department store would hardly have gained the vogue it
has today. It is important in this connection that women read the Sunday
paper before they did the dailies. The women are buyers.
It was in the Sunday newspaper that the methods of yellow journalism
were first completely worked out. The men who are chiefly responsible
for them are Morrill Goddard and Arthur Brisbane. It was Goddard’s
ambition to make a paper that a man would buy even if he could not read
it. He went in for pictures, first in black and white and then in
colors. It was in the _Sunday World_ that the first seven-column cut was
printed. Then followed the comic section and all the other devices with
which we are familiar for compelling a dull-minded and reluctant public
to read.
After these methods had been worked out in the Sunday paper, they were
introduced into the daily. The final triumph of the yellow journal was
Brisbane’s “Heart-to-Heart Editorials”—a column of predigested
platitudes and moralizing, with half-page diagrams and illustrations to
re-enforce the text. Nowhere has Herbert Spencer’s maxim that the art of
writing is economy of attention been so completely realized.
Walter Lippmann, in his recent study of public opinion, calls attention
to the fact that no sociologist has ever written a book on news
gathering. It strikes him as very strange that an institution like the
press, from which we expect so much and get so little of what we expect,
should not have been the subject of a more disinterested study.
It is true that we have not studied the newspaper as the biologists have
studied, for example, the potato bug. But the same may be said of every
political institution, and the newspaper is a political institution
quite as much as Tammany Hall or the board of aldermen are political
institutions. We have grumbled about our political _institutions_,
sometimes we have sought by certain magical legislative devices to
exercise and expel the evil spirits that possessed them. On the whole we
have been inclined to regard them as sacred and to treat any fundamental
criticism of them as a sort of blasphemy. If things went wrong, it was
not the institutions, but the persons we elected to conduct them, and an
incorrigible human nature, who were at fault.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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