Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

whiff of Hawthorne’s fear of the “ink-stained Amazons” lingered. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, reporter Ella Kaye used unsavory tricks to get an older rich man to do her bidding. As he confided in a letter to a friend, Fitzgerald based Kaye on Nellie Bly. In his novel Active Service, Stephen Crane, who worked at both the World and the Journal, reporting on the Tenderloin and doing stunts, described the sudden appearance of his hero’s romantic interest, the actress “Nora Black,” on the field of the Greco-Turkish War. The main character was surprised and embarrassed to see her. “But why are you here?” he asked, to which she coolly responded that she had been hired as a reporter for an opposition paper at a bigger salary than his. As he revised and republished his novel Portrait of a Lady, first released in 1881, Henry James made his journalist character Henrietta Stackpole increasingly vulgar, tracking the trashing of female reporters. One character commented, in the 1908 revision, “Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future—it almost knocks you down!”

The yellow did seem like it would stain the entire profession if reporters and editors didn’t do something about it. Pelted by disapproval, journalism began to professionalize. Previously, pushback greeted the idea of a reporter getting a journalism degree or even going to college. New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had said, “Of all horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate.” The pressroom would provide its own education. And in the days of stunt reporting, it did. While many of the men in Pulitzer and Hearst’s offices had a college education (at Harvard, more often than not), many of the women, including successes like Bly and Black, had only the most rudimentary high school coursework.

But suddenly, in the wake of the Spanish-American War coverage, formal training seemed like a good idea. Pulitzer, in particular, was passionate about the notion. By the turn of the century, a handful of colleges offered journalism classes, but his vision was larger. He had always spoken eloquently about journalism’s potential; launching a school would be a way to promote these ideas and rehabilitate his image. Pulitzer laid out the concept in a 1904 article for the North American Review. He didn’t want a course of study that provided a mere grounding in business or finance. Journalists are like artists and statesmen, he argued, “whose thoughts reach beyond their own livelihood to some common interest” and warned, “Once let the public come to regard the press as exclusively a commercial business and there is an end of its moral power.” Students should learn ethics and study the great newspaper battles of the past to learn the lessons found there, Pulitzer wrote.

In many ways this tightening of standards was a good thing. Unregulated undercover work is open to abuses. Stories in the World and the Journal and papers they inspired could be highly exaggerated if not outright false. But like the formation of the American Medical Association with its explicit goal of discrediting midwives, and the institutionalization of the natural sciences, which labeled many women “amateur naturalists,” while men grabbed government and university jobs as botanists, entomologists, and astronomers, the change erected financial and cultural barriers for all women and racial barriers for those who weren’t white.

By 1910, Walter Williams, dean of the newly founded University of Missouri School of Journalism, advised reporters against adopting the role of “private detective” and writing anything they would not like their mother or sister to read, among other sins. Undercover investigations and first-person reporting were frowned upon. Distance and objectivity were prized.

Pulitzer didn’t live to see the reality of his educational dream. He died in 1911 at sixty-four on his yacht in Charleston Harbor, after twenty years of trying to outrun his ill health. A year later, funded by $2 million of Pulitzer’s fortune, the Columbia Journalism School plotted its September opening. But while the board hashed out details of curriculum, one pressing question remained: Would Columbia allow women? Were they part of this grand vision for the journalistic future? Things didn’t look good: the newly appointed director had at one point given a speech against women’s suffrage. Trustees were rumored to fear that coeducation would infect other parts of the university. The current building didn’t have accommodations for women and the new one wouldn’t be completed for several years. And planners seemed to be avoiding the issue.

“Was any decision reached on the question of admitting women to the school?” a reporter pressed the assistant director after an early board meeting. The assistant director brushed him off.

But, finally, Barnard stepped in. The women’s college would provide female students with their first two years of courses, at which point they could join the men at Columbia. Pulitzer’s journalism school opened in the fall with seventy-nine students, including twelve women.

After the era of stunts ended, exposés continued, though with a different focus, a different framing, and almost exclusively male authorship. Publications like McClure’s and Everybody’s Magazine ran lengthy articles by writers like Lincoln Steffens on government corruption, tainted food, and factory accidents. The constant questioning of institutions prompted President Roosevelt to make a 1906 speech condemning this branch of reporting. He lambasted “the man with the muck rake,” a figure from Pilgrim’s Progress who looked only “downward with the muck-rake in his hand.” The man with the muck rake was so focused on the filth and grime, Roosevelt said, he couldn’t look up to see the possibility of anything better. This attitude discouraged people from public life, promoted cynicism, and stunted the ability to recognize “worthy endeavor.” Roosevelt meant it as a criticism, but the term “muckraker” had a long life, and soon became a badge of honor while its progenitor, “stunt reporter” became a badge of shame.

After stunt reporters faded, a new female-branded journalism genre appeared in its place: the “sympathy squad,” the “pity platoon,” the “gush girls,” the “sob sisters.” Rooted in Jordan’s perception at the Lizzie Borden trial that