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This chapter sets Joseph Pulitzer's spectacular building for his paper, the New York World, against the moves uptown by the Herald and the Times that would begin the shift away from the nineteenth-century concentration on Park Row. Pulitzer's aim was to have the tallest building in the world and a shining beacon in New York City. At twenty-six stories and rising over three hundred feet from the sidewalk to the base of the lantern on top of the dome, the building achieved the height superiority and the notoriety that Pulitzer wanted. The chapter demonstrates how the taller structures signaled a new corporate presence in the city, as wealthy press barons with seemingly unlimited resources increasingly led the news industry. Publishers like Pulitzer built their offices on the uppermost floors from which they could survey the city, their readers, and their competitors.

In this chapter, Ellis describes Cobb’s difficult first year in the big city. Finding a job to support his family and learning how the New York newspapers were run proved to be a daunting task. Cobb’s big breakthrough came as a reporter for the New York Sun covering the Portsmouth Peace Conference. This led to several job offers, including one from Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World, which Cobb accepted. Over the next six years, Cobb increased his role at this leading newspaper and honed his skills as a writer. Ellis then explores the development of Cobb’s writing as he branched out to produce a variety of columns and stories. Cobb’s success as a reporter led to his rapid rise to fame as he became one of the most popular writers in New York.

This chapter illustrates how, in the years leading up to the launch of The New Yorker, sport had assumed an increasingly important place in American mass leisure. Joseph Pulitzer became the first publisher of a New York daily paper to establish a distinct sports department — one of a series of measures that saw the circulation of the World rise from 11,000 in 1883 to 1.3 million in 1898. Although Pulitzer recruited regular contributors on forty different sports, it was the popularity of baseball and boxing (decried as barbaric on the editorial page but heavily represented in the sports pages) that transformed casual readers into fervent fans. William Randolph Hearst followed Pulitzer's example when he took over the New York Journal in 1895, expanding the sports section and even placing sports stories on the front page.

This chapter talks about George Luks securing work at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, wherein five and a half months later he would illustrate the paper’s most popular comic strip, Hogan’s Alley. The comic strip depicts one of its more loveable characters, Mickey Dugan, a barefoot street urchin who was always covered in a yellow nightshirt. Dugan was a creation of Richard Felton Outcault, and debuted in Pulitzer’s newspaper in February of 1895. The chapter narrates how Outcault was seduced by William Randolph Hearst, editor of the rival New York Journal, and how Pulitzer then hired Luks to continue drawing the Yellow Kid. Hogan’s Alley, however, was quite different from Luks’s other drawings for the news items appearing in the World. With Hogan’s Alley, the picture itself became “news.” The rest of the chapter talks mostly about the success and the influence that Hogan’s Alley created for Luks.

The Introduction questions the legendary origin story for sensational journalism: in the late 1890s, competition between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer degraded serious journalism into “yellow journalism” – sometimes blamed for the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. The apocryphal story of Spanish authorities strip-searching female Cuban rebels captures sensationalism’s essence: the dissemination of false news to increase sales and further an agenda, through strident headlines, inventive reporting, and eye-catching illustration. As early as 1870, in fact, line illustrations gave commercial publications across the political spectrum tools to attract readers, or perhaps more accurately, “news consumers.” While use of headlines, scoops, and stunts date back to the 1830s, it was the proliferation of images in newspaper pages that came to define sensational journalism by century’s end.

To better recruit and discipline their young distribution force, newspaper publishers and circulation managers in the 1880s became pioneers of corporate welfare. Led by Joseph Pulitzer in St. Louis, E. W. Scripps in Detroit and Cincinnati, Victor Lawson in Chicago, and George Booth in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they organized newsboy banquets, excursions, clubs, schools, and marching bands. They also sponsored newsboy boxing tournaments and fielded newsboy baseball teams. A dozen eastern newspapers formed their own newsboy baseball league. Newsboys took full advantage of these programs, as well as the newsboy homes and reading rooms founded by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but they also organized unions, struck for better pay and working conditions, and participated in political campaigns and protests. Ultimately, they sought justice over charity.