The "yellow press" appeared at the end of the 19th century in the United States. Over the next hundred years, it has spread all over the world, attracting the attention of the consumer with bright pictures, catchy headlines and the content of interesting and sometimes sensational texts that does not burden the brain too much. At the same time, the very term "yellow" for some reason is considered almost synonymous with "tabloid". And this is absolutely not the case.
In Search of the Captain "Sensation"
The theory of modern journalism refers to the "yellow press" as the cheaper printed publications, which mainly specialize in covering sensations, scandals, and rumors. These are newspapers that do not disdain to pay close attention to the personal life of famous people, first of all, with the help of dictaphones and cameras, including the not very pleasant side of it.
The latter circumstance often negates the difference between ordinary, “yellow” and “tabloid” press in the perception of readers. In the struggle for circulation and money, the "tabloid" press does not disdain even beautiful lies and gross distortion of facts. Emphasizes not on the integrity of the text, but on the protrusion of shocking details, even individual words. The “yellow press” does not do this. But in most cases, only a specialist is able to grasp the difference, which an ordinary reader, as a rule, is not.
Fought two "New York"
There is no exact information about who exactly and why introduced the stable expression "yellow press". But there are two major versions. The first one is economic. It consists in the fact that, having decided to sell newspapers that are radically 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 "Yellow Baby". This was the name of a parody comic book published in the United States in 1896, dedicated to the Sino-Japanese War.
The dirty and unkempt yellow kid depicted in the comic, translated into English as Yellow Kid, not only very much resembled a Japanese, but was also similar in name to him. After all, "Japanese" and "yellow" sound the same - Yellow. The comic became the subject of a public controversy between two North American media moguls and major newspaper publishers. New York World CEO Joseph Pulitzer and New York Journal American's William Randolph Hearst got into the controversy over the Yellow Baby.
Front page sex
By the way, it is Joseph Pulitzer, who is much better known as the founder of the award of the same name, and William Hirst are considered the “parents” of newspapers marked “yellow press”. Their publications were the first in the world to focus on publishing materials, the headlines, photos and texts of which tried to awaken extraordinary emotions in people. Including, for example, curiosity, humor, envy, anger, anxiety, fear, hate. Thus, this pushed to follow the continuation of history and new similar materials, pay money for exciting 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 themes of sex, crime, death, sensational and mysterious words, events and phenomena, which were previously closed to readers, appeared on the front pages of publications. And for journalists it has become quite common and normal to add a fair amount of shocking, cynicism and vulgarity to the published materials.
"Yellow" Russia
Newspapers and magazines, which could arouse the approval of the Americans Pulitzer and Hirst, appeared in the USSR and Russia only after the announcement of the course towards so-called glasnost, freedom of speech and the elimination of censorship. More precisely, their publication and distribution has just resumed. After all, the first openly "yellow" newspaper existed in Russia even before 1917. It had a name that fully corresponded to both the form of such a press, and its content and price - "Kopeyka".
As for the present, an article by Yevgeny Dodolev, sensational for the then socialist country, served as a kind of signal for the beginning of the information "yellowness" of domestic journalism. In 1986, he published in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets two texts dedicated to the capital's prostitutes: "Night Hunters" and "White Dance". And after a while on newspaper counters and showcases of Soyuzpechat, truly “yellow” publications began to be free - Express Newspaper, Top Secret, Life, AIDS Info, Megapolis Express. and many others.
