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The Rise of the Tabloid and the Death of Reading
Washed in blood
I am reading Blood and Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime. Author Joe Pompeo uncovers the sordid details of the double murder of high-society Episcopalian minister Edward Hall and his apparent secret love interest Eleanor Mills, a church choir member. Reverend Hall was married to Frances, an heiress with rich family roots, which included a familial tie to the Johnson & Johnson dynasty.
The Amazon summary of the book:
On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were found beneath a crabapple tree on an abandoned farm outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The killer had arranged the bodies in a pose conveying intimacy.
The murder of Hall, a prominent clergyman whose wife, Frances Hall, was a proud heiress with illustrious ancestors and ties to the Johnson & Johnson dynasty, would have made headlines on its own. But when authorities identified Eleanor Mills as a choir singer from his church married to the church sexton, the story shocked locals and sent the scandal ricocheting around the country, fueling the nascent tabloid industry. This provincial double murder on a lonely lover’s lane would soon become one of the most famous killings in American history—a veritable crime of the century.
The bumbling local authorities failed to secure any indictments, however, and it took a swashbuckling crusade by the editor of a circulation-hungry Hearst tabloid to revive the case and bring it to trial at last.
Blood & Ink freshly chronicles what remains one of the most electrifying but forgotten murder mysteries in U.S. history. It also traces the birth of American tabloid journalism, pandering to the masses with sordid tales of love, sex, money, and murder.
The sensational New Jersey story captivated much of America and became the firstfruits of our obsession with true crime mysteries. Today, every streaming service offers dozens of sensational crime stories, but back then, news like that was mostly regional at best.
Bathed in Ink
Pompeo titled his book Blood and Ink to highlight another important story element: The rise of the tabloid newspaper fed the story to the masses and fueled the national interest. American newspapers had always been text-heavy before that. Stories in small print filled the front page of large, unwieldy newspapers and spilled into interior pages. A determination to read was required, along with the tenacity to navigate the unintuitive layout.
Alfred Harmsworth of Great Britain began to change all that when he launched the world’s first tabloid newspaper in London in 1903. He named it The Daily Mirror, and it grew to over a million subscriptions, a massive number for the day.
Here is how that went down.
In 1900 Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, invited Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northciffe), founder of the Daily Mail in London, to edit the World for one day. Harmsworth’s imaginative version of the World, which came out on January 1, 1901, was half the size of the paper’s customary format and was heralded as the “newspaper of the 20th century.” Harmsworth’s conception of a tabloid, however, referred not to the reduced size of the newspaper but to the economical use of printing space, which he filled with short stories, short paragraphs, and simple sentences.
In 1903 Harmsworth started the first modern tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, in London. Appealing to the mass market, it presented crime stories, human tragedies, celebrity gossip, sports, comics, and puzzles. The Mirror offered more photographs than other newspapers and presented its stories in a reduced and easy-to-read manner. By 1909 it was selling a million copies per day. Soon the new British tabloids the Daily Sketch and the Daily Graphic were employing Harmsworth’s concept.
My point here is not to rehash the crime or its details but to mourn the ultimate -and inevitable – dumbing down of society and language vis a vis the emergence of the tabloid. More pictures! Fewer words.
Framed in a Photo
Honestly, I don’t mind the fewer words part. I believe in the power of economy in writing. Say more with fewer words for greater impact. While long, arduous but famous literary works go unread by the masses, quips, quotes, and witticisms are repeated from generation to generation. Harness a truth in a memorable phrase, and it will propel and compel generations.
“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Benjamin Franklin
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt
“United we stand, divided we fall.” Patrick Henry
Hey, how about this one!
“A picture’s worth a thousand words.”
We repeat that phrase repeatedly and hand it to each succeeding generation as if it is a settled and immutable truth. But where did that quote come from? Who said it first and why?
Arthur Brisbane was the editor of the New York Evening Journal, a tabloid paper. He was one of the early proponents of the use of images to enhance and fuel newspaper stories and advertisements.
While speaking to the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, he advised, “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”
Who can argue that?
Do you know the stories behind these iconic 20th-century photographs?
“Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!” screamed Howard Cosell. In three words twice repeated and one iconic photo snapped by Neil Leffer, the fight of the century was encapsulated and preserved forever.
1,000 words ain’t many
I once became so enamored of the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words” that I decided to write a book based on that concept.
On the back cover of the little book, I posed the questions, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, what can be said in 1,000 words? What story told? What image painted? What journey taken? What difference made?”
The book is titled 1,000 Words: an epic journey in a series of short trips. I wrote it under my sometimes pen name L. A Holly. You can find it here.
My idea was to write ten very short stories, each exactly 1,000 words in length.
More than thirty years ago, while I was a minister and pastor of an East Texas Baptist church, I bought a book that informed my writing and speaking. It is titled Write Tight: Say Exactly What You Mean with Precision and Power. William Brohaugh, a former editor of Writer’s Digest, is the author. Brohaugh became my bro, powerfully impacting the way I view communication, both written and oral.
As a writer, I can lament the way nobody reads anything anymore. I can scream at the ghosts of Harmsworth and Brisbane. Or I can embrace the challenge to tell my stories using only the most essential words. That is the Hemingway way. Hemingway is renowned for his economy of words in his writing.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest Hemingway
Less is more, more or less
I have three copies of my 1,000 Words book, which I will sign and send to the first three readers of this article who write to me and request a free copy. I will even pay the postage. This offer is only available to those with addresses in the continental United States. Message me privately or email me at genestrother@gmail.com to request your free, signed copy. If you read it and like it (or don’t like it), leaving a review on Amazon is more than payment enough!
Or a cup of coffee, if you please. Buy it here.
Now, go forth, children of the pen, and write tight.
