The Yellow Press appeared at the end of the 19th century in the USA. Over a hundred-plus years following, it has spread all over the world, attracting consumer attention with bright pictures, catchy headlines and not too burdensome brain content of interesting and sometimes sensational texts. Moreover, the term "yellow" for some reason is considered almost a synonym for "tabloid". And this is completely wrong.
In search of the captain of "Sensation"
The “yellow press” theory of modern journalism means print media that are cheaper in cost, specializing mainly in covering sensations, scandals, and rumors. These are newspapers that do not disdain to pay close attention to the personal lives of primarily famous people with the help of voice recorders and cameras, including not its most pleasant side.
The latter circumstance often eliminates the perception of readers of the difference between the regular, "yellow" and "tabloid" press. In the struggle for circulation and money, the "tabloid" press does not disdain even a beautiful lie and a gross distortion of facts. It does not focus on the integrity of the text, but on the protrusion of shocking details, even individual words. The "yellow press" does not deal with such. But in most cases, only a specialist is able to catch the difference, which an ordinary reader, as a rule, is not.
Fought two "New York"
There is no exact data on who exactly and why introduced the stable expression "yellow press". But the main versions are two. The first one is economic. It consists in the fact that, having decided to sell newspapers that are fundamentally different not only in content and price, but also in form with color, the publishers chose cheaper yellow paper for them. The second option looks more scandalous and is called the "Yellow Baby". That was the name of the parody comic strip published in the USA in 1896, dedicated to the Sino-Japanese war.
The dirty and untidy yellow kid depicted in the comic, translated into English, the Yellow Kid, not only looked very much like a Japanese, but was similar to him by name. After all, "Japanese" and "yellow" sound the same - Yellow. The comics became the subject of public disagreement between the two North American media moguls and the publishers of major newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer, who led the New York World, and William Randolph Hurst of the New York Journal American joined in a dispute over the Yellow Baby.
Front page sex
By the way, it is Joseph Pulitzer, who is much better known as the founder of the same name award, and William Hurst who are considered the "parents" of newspapers marked "yellow press". The editions belonging to them were the first in the world to focus on the publication of materials, headlines, photos and texts of which they tried to arouse extraordinary emotions in people. Including, for example, curiosity, humor, envy, anger, anxiety, fear, hatred. Thus, it pushed to follow the continuation of the story and new similar materials, pay money for a fascinating reading and increase circulation.
Thanks to Pulitzer and Hirst, newspapers began to cover in detail, with numerous illustrations, not only some really important events for the world, country and society. The topics of sex, crime, death, sensational and mysterious words, events and phenomena, which were previously closed to readers, came to the front pages of publications. And for journalists it became quite mundane and normal to add a fair amount of shocking, cynicism and vulgarity to published materials.
