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Title: Periodicals/Journalism 20th Century
Contextualization: While the 1900s is a long time span with a great number of events occurring during that 100 years,
there are some that stand out above the rest. World War I took place from 1914 to 1918. World War II followed twenty years
later from 1939 to 1945. The Korean War ran from 1950 to 1953. The conflict of Vietnam took place from 1965 to 1973.
Salient Points: Humans discovered and advanced so many things during the 1900s including flight, chlorine gas, weapons,
music, the atom bomb, movies, color movies, cartoon films, telegrams, mass printing abilities, and many other fantastic achievements.
With the ability to mass produce newspapers, the costs went down and the news was more readily available to all kinds of people.
The papers were approximately a penny apiece. This created a problem for the publishers. The papers now had to cater to
multiple levels of audiences, so Joseph Pulitzer solved the problem and was copied by rival publisher William Randolph Hearst.
The two publishers battled to sell more than the other did. This New York team created the local stories in sensationalized
styles so that both the working class and the elite could enjoy the material. These sensationalized local stories became
known as Yellow Journalism. The newspaper stories were no longer just reporting the news; the stories were thrown out of
proportion and were often unethical. Some of the stories were slanderous and falsely accused people.
Influence on Short Story: Yellow Journalism became a basis of the American short story. Due to the less-than-true nature
of the stories, the articles in the newspapers were forms of short stories themselves. People were entertained by the stories
in the newspapers and wanted more. Yellow Journalism opened literature to all people from the elite to the working class.
More and more people were literate and read the newspapers, which lead to exploration of other works and forms of literature,
including the short story.
Connections to Our Class: Yellow journalism influenced the style of short stories. The libelous nature of the stories
is transferred into more modern pieces of fiction. Generally the main character is slandered in some way either verbally
through the dialogue or in a news story within the story, or with in the plot in the manner of a scandalous act of some sort.
The act, like in Paul's Case when the teacher's were telling stories about him, is made to sound much more intense and sensationalized
than the act was. The description of Paul's meeting with his teachers and principal was made to sound so much more through
the intensity and variation of the language. The ordeal, from the narrator's point of view, sounds very grandiose and blown
out of proportion. Even in the recent hit series Harry Potter, though not a short story, there is Yellow Journalism in Rita
Skeeter's slander of Harry. Even though the circulation wars of Pulitzer and Hearst are over, we still see evidence of the
sensationalized works of the newspapers in literature today, particularly in the condensed short stories.
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