Definition of Yellow Press

It is designated with the terms of yellow press to that press that is characterized by presenting and privilege those information and images in which accidents, blood, crimes, the adultery, the political entanglements and the scandals that the men and women of the spectacle, either those caused and generated by themselves or those that of course have the sponsorship, the production and the imagination of this type of press.

The first manifestations of the yellow press, also called tabloid press in some parts of the world, appeared towards the end of the 19th century, more precisely between 1895 and 1898, as a consequence of the journalistic confrontation between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World newspapers and the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst, meanwhile, the nickname was given by the rest of the publications, which were considered a little more serious than these and accused them of using resources very unorthodox to increase your sales, such as catastrophic headlines, paying the protagonists to get the exclusives on the issues of the moment, among others.

Was the Newspaper New York Press the first to use the expression to describe the methodology who used his competence. Through a Article entitled We called them yellow because they are yellow, in 1898 the phrase was coined, which was actually A play on words, since yellow, in addition to referring to color, refers, in the English language, to cowardly and cruel.

But everything has a reason and this battle between Hearst and Pulitzer had a very specific one: Mickey Dugan or Yellow Kid, the main character in Hogan's Alley, the United States' first mass-print, color-printed comic strip United. Yellow Kid was a boy characterized by the disheveled appearance of him, a silly smile and that he wore a T-shirt of sleeping yellow, hence the color in his nickname and that he lived in an alley with other characters equally scruffy. Although Yellow Kid communicated through phrases inscribed on his yellow t-shirt and with a rather popular language that bordered on marginality, which characterized this comic strip was the use of balloons to indicate the speech bubbles or dialogues of the characters, something that would later become popular but that at that time was certainly a milestone.

Though born into a magazine, the Yellow Kid would soon become the great attraction of the newspaper that Pulitzer ran, however the honeymoon would last very little, since soon the Yellow Kid would move to the competition, Hearst's newspaper, sparking the rivalry between the two publications and the birth of the expression of the press expression yellow.