  New York Journal American headlining the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad during World War II | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | William Randolph Hearst (1895–1951) William Randolph Hearst Jr.(1951–1966) |
| Publisher | Hearst Corporation |
| Founded | 1882 (asNew York Morning Journal) 1895 (asThe Journal) 1896 (New York Evening Journal) 1901 (asNew York (Morning) American) 1937(merger) |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Price | USD 0.20 City & Suburbs1957 |
TheNew York Journal-American was a daily newspaper published inNew York City from 1937 to 1966. TheJournal-American was the product of a merger between two New York newspapers owned byWilliam Randolph Hearst: theNew York American (originally theNew York Journal, renamedAmerican in 1901), a morning paper, and theNew York Evening Journal, an afternoon paper. Both were published by Hearst from 1895 to 1937. TheAmerican andEvening Journal merged in 1937.
Joseph Pulitzer's younger brotherAlbert founded theNew York Morning Journal in 1882. After three years of its existence,John R. McLean briefly acquired the paper in 1895. It was renamedThe Journal. But a year later in 1896, he sold it to Hearst.[1]
In 1901, the morning newspaper was renamedNew York American.
Hearst founded theNew York Evening Journal about a year later in 1896. He entered into a circulation war with theNew York World, the newspaper run by his former mentorJoseph Pulitzer and from whom he stole thecartoonistsGeorge McManus andRichard F. Outcault. In October 1896, Outcault defected to Hearst'sNew York Journal. Because Outcault had failed in his effort to copyrightThe Yellow Kid both newspapers published versions of the comic feature with George Luks providing theNew York World with their version after Outcault left.[2]The Yellow Kid was one of the firstcomic strips to be printed in color and gave rise to the phraseyellow journalism, used to describe the sensationalist and often exaggerated articles, which helped, along with a one-cent price tag, to greatly increase circulation of the newspaper. Many believed that as part of this, aside from any nationalistic sentiment, Hearst may have helped to initiate theSpanish–American War of 1898 with lurid exposes of Spanish atrocities against insurgents and foreign journalists. In October1936 the papers reporterDorothy Kilgallen participated in a raceto travel around the world on commercial airline flights, together withH. R. Ekins of theNew York World-Telegram andLeo Kieran ofThe New York Times. The race took 18 ½ days.
In 1937, the morningNew York American (since 1901) and the evening paperNew York Evening Journal merged intoNew York Journal-American. TheJournal-American was a publication with several editions in the afternoon and evening.
In the early 1900s, Hearst weekday morning and afternoon papers around the country featured scattered black-and-white comic strips, and on January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first fulldaily comics page in theEvening Journal.[3] On January 12, 1913, McManus launched hisBringing Up Father comic strip. The comics expanded into two full pages daily and a 12-pageSunday color section with leadingKing Features Syndicate strips. By the mid-1940s, the newspaper's Sunday comics includedBringing Up Father,Blondie, a full-pagePrince Valiant,Flash Gordon,The Little King,Buz Sawyer, Feg Murray'sSeein' Stars,Tim Tyler's Luck,Gene Ahern'sRoom and Board andThe Squirrel Cage,The Phantom,Jungle Jim,Tillie the Toiler,Little Annie Rooney,Little Iodine, Bob Green'sThe Lone Ranger,Believe It or Not!,Uncle Remus,Dinglehoofer und His Dog [fr],Donald Duck,Tippie,Right Around Home,Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, andThe Katzenjammer Kids.[4]
Tad Dorgan, known for his boxing and dog cartoons, as well as the comic characterJudge Rummy, joined theJournal's staff in 1905.
In 1922, theEvening Journal introduced a Saturday color comics tabloid with strips not seen on Sunday, and this 12-page tabloid continued for decades, offeringPopeye,Grandma, Don Tobin'sThe Little Woman,Mandrake the Magician,Don Flowers'Glamor Girls,Grin and Bear It,Buck Rogers, and other strips.[5]
Rube Goldberg andEinar Nerman also became cartoonists with theJournal-American.
TheEvening Journal was home to famed investigative reporterNellie Bly, who began writing for the paper in 1914 as a war correspondent from the battlefields of World War I. Bly eventually returned to the United States and was given her own column that she wrote right up until her death in 1922.
Popular columnists includedAmbrose Bierce,Benjamin De Casseres,Dorothy Kilgallen,O. O. McIntyre, andWestbrook Pegler. Kilgallen also wrote articles that appeared on the same days as her column on different pages, sometimes the front page. RegularJournal-American contributorJimmy Cannon was one of the highest paid sports columnists in the United States. Society columnistMaury Henry Biddle Paul, who wrote under the pseudonym "Cholly Knickerbocker", became famous and coined the term "Café Society".[6]John F. Kennedy contributed to the newspaper during a brief career as a journalist during the final months of World War II.[7]Leonard Liebling served as the paper's music critic from 1923 to 1936.[8]
Beginning in 1938,Max Kase (1898–1974) was the sports editor until the newspaper expired in 1966.[9] The fashion editor was Robin Chandler Duke.[10]
Jack O'Brian (1914–2000) was television critic for theJournal-American and exposed the1958 quiz-show scandal that involved cheating on the popular television programTwenty-One. O'Brian was a supporter of SenatorJoseph McCarthy and his series of published attacks onCBS News andWCBS-TV reporterDon Hollenbeck, may have been a major factor in Hollenbeck's eventual suicide, referenced in the 1986HBO filmMurrow and the 2005 motion pictureGood Night, and Good Luck.
Ford Frick (1894–1978) was a sportswriter for theAmerican before becoming president of baseball'sNational League (1934–1951), then commissioner ofMajor League Baseball (1951–1965). Frick was hired byWilton S. Farnsworth, who was sports editor of theAmerican from 1914 to 1937 until becoming a boxing promoter.
Bill Corum was a sportswriter for theJournal-American who also served nine years as president of theChurchill Downs race track.Frank Graham covered sports there from 1945 to 1965 and was inducted in theBaseball Hall of Fame, as were colleaguesCharley Feeney andSid Mercer.
Before becoming a news columnist elsewhere,Jimmy Breslin was aJournal-American sportswriter in the early 1960s. He authored the bookCan't Anybody Here Play This Game? chronicling the season of the1962 New York Mets.
Sheilah Graham (1904–1988) was a reporter for theJournal-American before gaining fame as a gossip columnist and as an acquaintance ofF. Scott Fitzgerald.
William V. Finn, a staff photographer, died on the morning of June 25, 1958, while photographing the aftermath of a fiery collision between the tankerEmpress Bay and cargo shipNebraska in theEast River. Finn was a past-president of theNew York Press Photographers Association and was the second of only two of the association's members to die in the line of duty.
The newspaper was famous for publishing many photographs with the "Journal-American Photo" credit line as well as news photographs from theAssociated Press and otherwire services.
With one of the highest circulations in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, theJournal-American nevertheless had difficulties attracting advertising as its blue-collar reading base turned to television, a situation compounded by the fact thattelevision news was affecting evening newspapers more than their morning counterparts. The domination of television news became evident starting with the four-day period ofJFK's assassination,Jack Ruby's shooting ofLee Harvey Oswald and both men's funerals.[11] New York newspapers in general were in dire straits by then, followinga devastating newspaper strike in late 1962 and early 1963.
Journal-American editors, apparently sensing that psychotherapy and rock music were starting to enter the consciousness of both blue-collar and white-collar New Yorkers, enlistedDr. Joyce Brothers to write front-page articles in February 1964 analyzingthe Beatles. While the Beatles were filmingHelp! inthe Bahamas, columnistPhyllis Battelle interviewed them for articles that ran on theJournal-American front page and in other Hearst papers, including theLos Angeles Herald Examiner, for four consecutive days, from April 25 to 28, 1965.
During every visit that the Beatles made to New York in 1964 and 1965, including their appearances atShea Stadium, variousJournal-American columnists and reporters devoted a lot of space to them.[12]
Throughout 1964 and 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen'sVoice of Broadway column, which ran Sunday through Friday, often reported short news items about trendy young rock groups and performers such asThe Rolling Stones,The Animals,The Dave Clark Five,Mary Wells andSam Cooke. The newspaper was trying to keep up with the many mid-1960s changes in popular music and its interracial fan bases.
It published enlarged photographs of civil rights demonstrations, Dorothy Kilgallen's skepticism about theWarren Commission report as well as many reporters' stories on the increasing crime rate in New York's five boroughs.
Most of the front page of the Sunday edition of January 12, 1964 ran stories that were relevant to the previous day's announcement by U.S. Surgeon GeneralLuther Terry that "a blue ribbon committee of scientists and doctors," in the words of reporter Jack Pickering, had concluded that cigarette smoking was dangerous.[13]
TheJournal-American's feel of the pulse of the changing times of the mid-1960s hid the trouble that was going on behind the scenes at the paper, which was unknown to many New Yorkers until after it had ceased publication.
Besides trouble with advertisers, another major factor that led to theJournal-American's demise was a power struggle between Hearst CEORichard E. Berlin and two of Hearst's sons, who had trouble carrying on the father's legacy after his 1951 death.William Randolph Hearst Jr. claimed in 1991 that Berlin, who died in 1986, had suffered fromAlzheimer's disease starting in the mid-1960s and that caused him to shut down several Hearst newspapers without just cause.[14]
TheJournal-American ceased publishing in April 1966, officially the victim of a general decline in the revenue of afternoon newspapers. While participating in a lock-out in 1965 afterThe New York Times andNew York Daily News had been struck by a union, theJournal-American agreed it would merge (the following year) with its evening rival, theNew York World-Telegram and Sun, and the morningNew York Herald-Tribune. According to its publisher, publication of the combinedNew York World Journal Tribune was delayed for several months after the April 1966 expiration of its three components because of difficulty reaching an agreement with manual laborers who were needed to operate the press. TheWorld Journal Tribune commenced publication on September 12, 1966, but folded eight months later.
Other afternoon and evening newspapers that expired following the rise of network news in the 1960s donated their clipping files and many darkroom prints of published photographs to libraries. TheHearst Corporation decided to donate the "basic back-copy morgue" of theJournal-American, according to a book about Dorothy Kilgallen,[15] plus darkroom prints andnegatives, according to other sources, to theUniversity of Texas at Austin. Office memorandums and letters from politicians and other notables were shredded in 1966, shortly after the newspaper expired.[16]
Unlike two other New York City daily newspapers, thetabloidNew York Daily News andThe New York Times, theJournal-American has not been digitized and can not be accessed in adatabase or online archive. The newspaper is preserved on microfilm in New York City, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas.Interlibrary loans make the microfilm accessible to people who cannot travel to those cities. TheCOVID-19 pandemic curtailed interlibrary loans, especially for researchers who need reels of microfilm that exist in very few places. On rare occasions, researchers have digitally scannedJournal-American pages, articles or columns, such as Dorothy Kilgallen's, from microfilm and shared them on social media and other websites. These are rare opportunities for historians to become familiar with this newspaper.
TheJournal-American photo morgue is housed at theHarry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The photographic morgue consists of approximately two million prints and one million negatives created for publication, with the bulk of the collection covering the years from 1937 to the paper's demise in 1966.[17] TheDolph Briscoe Center for American History, also at the University of Texas at Austin, has theJournal-American morgue of clippings, numbering approximately nine million.[18] Because they are not digitized and because employees of the facility have limited time for communicating by email with people who are searching for very old articles, the people who are searching should know the date of aJournal-American article to locate it on microfilm.
Two scoops ofThe Journal was the printing of the confession of Herman Webster Mudghett aka Dr.H. H. Holmes a serial killer of Chicago in 1896 and the Jacob Smith order of 1902
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