New York World
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The New York World was a newspaper published in New York from 1860 until 1931. It played a major role in the history of American newspapers.
The newspaper was unsuccessful until it was purchased by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883. Nellie Bly, a reporter on the paper, became one of America's first investigative journalists, often working undercover. As a publicity stunt for the paper inspired by the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, she travelled around the planet in 72 days.
In 1890 Pulitzer built the New York World Building, the tallest office building in the world at the time. It was razed in 1955 to make way for a new approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
In 1896, the World began using a four-color printing press and became the first to launch a color supplement, which featured the Yellow Kid cartoon, Hogan's Alley. It then joined a circulation battle with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American.
The World was at the time attacked for being "sensational", and its later circulation battles with Hearst's Journal American gave rise to the term yellow journalism, which have led many to believe the World and the Journal were little more than rags. One should note, however, that the charges of sensationalism were most frequently leveled at the paper by more established publishers, who resented Pulitzer's courting of the immigrant classes. And while the World presented its fair share of crime stories, it also published damning exposés of tenement abuses. After a heat wave in 1883 killed a disproportionate number of children and led the World to publish stories under headlines like "Lines of Little Hearses", the adverse publicity spurred action for reform. Hearst reproduced Pulitzer's approach in the San Francisco Examiner and later in the Journal American.
In 1911, Joseph Pulitzer died, passing control of the World to his sons, Ralph, Joseph and Herbert Pulitzer. The World continued to grow under its executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope, who hired writers such as Frank Sullivan and Deems Taylor. Among the World's noted journalists were columnists Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.) who wrote "The Conning Tower" and Heywood Broun who penned "It Seems To Me" on the editorial page.
The paper published the first crossword puzzle in 1913. The annual reference book called The World Almanac was founded by the newspaper and retains its name. The belief that the World Series of baseball is also named after the newspaper, however, is unfounded.[1]
In 1931 the heirs of Pulitzer went to court to sell the World. A surrogate court judge decided in the Pulitzer sons' favor; it was purchased by Roy Howard for his Scripps-Howard chain. He promptly closed the World and laid off the staff of 3,000 after the final issue was printed February 27, 1931. Howard added the World name to his afternoon paper, the Evening Telegram and called it the New York World-Telegram.
