The original clickbait king

0:00This message comes from Easy Cater, making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com. While all seemed so dark and helpless to me in my prison, events were shaping towards my delivery.

0:26For weeks, a brave, strong man had been watching the jail, seeking some weak spot, trying to find some way to rescue me. The year is 1897, and Evangelina Cisneros, a teenage girl from a well-off family, has been in prison in Cuba for over a year. She doesn't know anything about the welfare of her family. and she's horrified by the conditions. Initially, she lives in what she calls a large cage with other women. Hundreds of the most terrible women that could be dreamed of. Eventually, she's taken to a more private room, which she shares with other women accused of a similar crime to her. Treason against Spanish colonial rule.

1:15Month after month, she sits and looks out the window, awaiting her fate.

1:26The only windows to be seen from the alley were about 35 feet from the ground and were protected by massive iron bars. Down below, a man from Washington, D.C. looks up at the very window from which Evangelina looks out. For weeks, he and a small group of men have been casing the jailhouse in hopes of breaking her free. They manage to smuggle in a note, asking her for ideas to break out. She writes back. My plan is the following, to escape by the roof. Her escape plan included drugging the women in her cell. So as to set to sleep my companions. The men made a few tweaks to her plan. They rent the house next to the jail.

2:10And a couple of days later, covered by the darkness of night, they cross between the roofs of the buildings. The prison warden, hearing a sound, appears in the street. Three.44 caliber revolvers covered him, and his discovery of our position on the roof would have called for his immediate execution. The warden retreats, and the men walk across the roof, just above the barred window of Evangelina Cisneros' jail cell, where she's waiting. I had many fantastic dreams in my prison, But I never dreamed of liberty coming to me from an American newspaper.

2:51More than a thousand miles away, in New York City, the man orchestrating this whole jailbreak sits at his desk awaiting an update. His name is William Randolph Hearst. He doesn't have any connections to Cuba, nor is he part of the U.S. government. He's the owner of the New York Journal, a newspaper man. And he's assigned his reporter, Carl Decker, to break Evangelina Cisneros out of jail. And that's because Hearst has been paying attention to the news out of Cuba, rumblings of a revolution against Spanish rule. And he believes his newspapers and reporters should actively work to correct society's wrongs and make them right.

3:35His motto? We will be the journalism that acts. Journalism that acts. It was a time of print media, and daily newspapers were the dominant medium of the day. And competition was extremely intense, especially in urban America, New York City in particular. So into that scene, William Randolph Hearst burst as big as life and upset the apple cart of American journalism.

4:04Before Hearst, American newspapers were mostly dull and dry. But he helped create a new style of journalism that leaned into the dramatic flair. Stories with narratives and pictures where his reporters were inserted into the action. And he then turned around and sold that drama to his audience. It was a moment that challenged and changed what journalism could look like. And the legacy of that style is all around us today. The term clickbait isn't meant as a compliment, but Hearst likely would have approved. Take expressions we've all heard before on the nightly news, like shocking new development or no one saw this coming or headlines like how Hurricane Katrina paved the way for American fascism.

4:51They are big and in your face so that you notice. But the need to grab people's attention by any means necessary has come at a cost. Today, trust in the media is low. Very low. Legacy news organizations are laying off staff. And what's truth or a fact is debated. Sometimes the role of journalists seems clear. Other times, not so much. And you can see it in the way people talk about journalism. When you have mainstream news organizations going along with what appears to be propaganda, with no pushback at all, Like, where's journalism? When you're trying to support one narrative instead of trying to actually show the entire picture and what's going on, it's going to absolutely be biased.

5:39I have no agenda. I'll tell you what my bias is. Whenever this show is mistakenly called journalism, it is a slap in the face to the actual journalist whose work we rely on. I get the liberal media loves to hate on the Trump administration and anything they do, but in the process, there are so many mistakes that are made along the way. There hasn't been a reckoning and how we deal with the media environment that allowed Trump to be birthed into existence. So what is our job? Are we providing information, galvanizing action? Who are we talking to? And what are we asking of them? I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah.

6:17We're spending today's show with Evangelina Cisneros and William Randolph Hearst, the man who changed American journalism from a mere record to a verb. And we'll think through what his story tells us about the state of news today.

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8:06Please consult a qualified tax professional. This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab with its original podcast on investing. Each week, you'll get thoughtful, in-depth analysis of both the stock and the bond markets. Listen today and subscribe at schwab.com slash oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts. Part 1. Making the News. It's a cold, miserable January day in San Francisco in 1890. 26-year-old William Randolph Hearst gets word of a horrible scene unfolding in the bay. There was a boat that capsized in the San Francisco Bay. A crew of five fishermen have been struck by a wave that's caused the boat's bow to shoot up into the air and bring the entire boat under.

9:00The men who can swim try to make their way to some nearby rocks. The rest aren't so lucky. And a number of the people on that boat were drowned. One makes it to the rocks, the spray of the rising tide washing over him as he waits for help. There was a single man flailing in the water, clinging desperately to the rocks. Hearst springs into action. Hearst hires a tugboat, sends his reporters out there. His reporters, because Hearst owns the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that had almost tripled its circulation to about 45 ,000 since he took it over. And out in the bay, he sees an opportunity.

9:45Karen Roggenkamp:A naked man was on Point Bonita rocks crying for help. At 11 o 'clock, the high tide would cover the rocks, and he must die unless help was sent. A Russian fisherman named Antonio Nicholas. And they rescue the man. He's the only survivor. The examiner writes the whole thing up for the next day's paper. In their telling, the lifeguards were refusing to go out. The conditions were rough. The surf was too high. They, of course, get all sorts of fodder for their paper, talking about how, look, these officials have failed these people. According to the Examiner, San Francisco's lifeguards had failed.

10:29And the only people who had taken action in the face of what the other newspapers had called an impossible rescue mission were the Examiner's two reporters. Who's the hero? The journalists are the hero. The Examiner has come to the rescue.

10:43Karen Roggenkamp:Everywhere were heard praises for the Enterprise and heroism. This is what you can count on. This is what we stand for. Action on your behalf. Copies of The Examiner containing the thrilling account of the rescue were sold almost as fast as they could be printed. It really sets the model for what he just explores with so much more vigor and detail in the following years. This is Karen Rogenkamp. I'm professor of English at East Texas A &M University. I'm author of two books, Narrating the News and Sympathy, Madness and Crime, both of which look at 19th century periodicals. According to Karen, what Hearst did with the San Francisco Examiner was just the beginning of how he would infuse action into journalism.

11:36Because remember, at the time of the shipwreck rescue, Hearst was only 26, and he'd only been at the helm of the paper for three years. This would be a good time to stop and explain how a guy in his 20s ended up with a newspaper, which, for the record, was a huge deal in the 19th century because newspapers were the main way people got news. There was no radio, no television, no social media. Print was king. So Hearst sees the power in newspapers and wants in. And if you wanted to get into politics, there was no quicker way to do it than buying your own newspaper. Luckily for Hearst, his dad had one.

12:16But Hearst thought it needed a makeover, from boring to sensational. Hearst, for a long time, pitches to his dad, hey, let me take this paper over, let me turn this into something really exciting and fantastic.

12:34Hearst, by all accounts, always had a flair for the dramatic and kind of approached life itself in melodramatic terms. He wasn't a good student. He rather famously was expelled from Harvard, partly because of academic reasons, but also because he was a terrific prankster. and just kept getting into trouble. But he wanted to be the West Coast Pulitzer. Pulitzer, as in Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of The New York World, which at the time was the leading national voice of the Democratic Party. Hearst idolized him. Pulitzer was a big deal, and he'd already spearheaded a movement called New Journalism.

13:18The premise of New Journalism is to revive what people think the news should do, make it something more exciting and more accessible for the common reader. Much of journalism at that time was dry. Newspaper articles were text-heavy, rows and rows of dense columns with no pictures, and many of them weren't accessible to everyone. The audience was not welcoming of people perhaps whose first language was not English or who did not have the level of education that would make them want to pick up the current newspapers. So reinventing journalism also meant reinventing what newspapers looked like and how they read.

14:07Things like huge headlines, stacked headlines that are using very colorful language, the use of ample illustration. It would tell stories rather than just provide information. You've got recognizable plot points. You've got characters. It's written in a style that uses dialogue and imagery. So it's constantly blending the techniques of fiction writing with the techniques of reporting. William Randolph Hearst was all in. He told his reporters that if stories on the front page of his paper didn't elicit a gee whiz, well, they'd failed. On the second page, readers should say, holy Moses. And on the third, a God almighty.

14:57And his vision wasn't limited to San Francisco. He wanted his newspapers in the hottest market in the country. And William Randolph Hearst realized that he had to succeed in New York City. This is W. Joseph Campbell. He's an emeritus professor of communication at American University. And he's written about Hearst and journalism in the 19th century. And you know that saying, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere? That was definitely true for newspapers at the time. Hearst knew it and moved east. And right away... Just shook up the place, just shook up the city. And right from the get-go, he sets out to challenge Pulitzer's world.

15:35His flagship paper, that is. The New York World. It's a crowded marketplace. There are lots of newspapers in New York. But the world is the big boy. Hearst purchased a failing newspaper called the New York Journal. Gone were the days of hero-worshipping Pulitzer. Now Pulitzer was his competitor. And Hearst wanted to win. And he basically sweeps into New York with a bottomless pocketbook and does everything in his power to undermine Pulitzer. He sells his paper, the journal, for one cent a day, where Pulitzer is still charging two cents a day. He is brash. He is outrageous. He goes in and he steals away all of Pulitzer's best reporters and editors.

16:28And commissioned work from big names like Mark Twain. And so Hearst just goes in with guns blazing. And as part of this competition, Hearst wanted more eyeballs. And he went to increasingly outrageous lengths to get them. Before long, the age of new journalism was over. and in its place came yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is like new journalism, but with a massive dose of steroids. It takes that line between fact and fiction and blurs it even further, and in many cases just throws it out the window. Now, you have to understand that audiences of the time didn't mind if not every little detail in a news story was based on fact.

17:20There are advice manuals for journalists at the time that say, make sure the essential facts of your story are there. But your audience is going to forgive you if you are a little loosey-goosey with some of the less important details. Make it colorful. Make it engaging. The worst thing you can do is to write a dull story. Of course, there were some people who didn't like the style of journalism. Yellow journalism was a term that was developed by a rival newspaper editor named Irvin Wardman, who ran the New York Press. He really resented Hearst's wealth, resented Hearst's flamboyance, and resented the innovations that Hearst was bringing to newspapers, including color comics.

18:08One of the comics that Hearst was publishing at the time was colloquially known as The Yellow Kid. And the centerpiece of the comic was a young, bald street urchin in New York City who wore a flamboyant yellow nightshirt. Irvin Wordman found this just awful and resented that kind of intrusion of frivolous characters into American journalism. And this is early 1897. Wordman comes up with the term yellow kid journalism, sort of indirectly drawing on the comic-strict character of the yellow kid. And then soon after that, just called it yellow journalism. And it just stuck, and it lives on to this day.

18:58Her style of journalism worked. The paper quickly became popular. Another feature of yellow journalism in the 1890s was the tendency to self-promotion. And Hearst was big into self-promotion, not for himself necessarily, but for his newspaper, because he wanted to make sure that this was the newspaper that people were speaking about, the newspaper that people wanted to buy. Hearst sent his reporters to look for the stories that would grab people's attention. Crime, drama, heroism. But reporting news was just one part of his approach. He also started to explore the possibilities for what kind of news he could make.

19:38He'd already sent reporters to save the capsized boats in San Francisco. But he wanted to do something bigger and bolder. And he got his chance in the summer of 1897, when... Great murder mystery that absorbed New York City in that summer. A human torso was found floating in the East River. And now it seemed like everyone in the city wanted to know who this person was and what had happened.

20:04Karen Roggenkamp:The mystery of the headless, haggled, mutilated body, which was found Saturday afternoon by two Eastside boys floating along the flood tide in the East River at the foot of 11th Street, is doubly a mystery now, more than ever, a horror. Hurst sees how captivated the city is by this mystery, And he decides it's not enough to report on the police investigation. Why leave the case to the police when he has a whole newsroom at his disposal? So he assembles his special team of journalists that he called... His murder squad in New York, whose role was to look at cases that were in the news and try to solve the mystery of what's going on here.

20:52And Hearst sends his reporters out first to identify who is this person.

21:00Karen Roggenkamp:The journal establishes the disappearance of Goldensup. The dead man is named William Goldensup. The journal identifies him as a German immigrant who works at a Turkish bathhouse. Not only that, they, through their reporting, detect who the likely murderer is, and they go and confront this person and perform a citizen's arrest. The Journal's reporters arrest Nack, the husband, who had threatened Goldensupp's life. He turns out to be innocent. But Hearst reporters parse through clues and find that there are two culprits behind the murder. Golden Supp's lover and her other boyfriend. In a tale made for, and in this case reported out by the tabloids, the murder is a result of a love triangle.

21:51They were far ahead of the police in solving this pretty heinous crime.

22:00And of course, they get to tell the story over and over again. It's almost like a serialized novel that they're writing. And they are actively participating in solving the mystery. It veered into kind of an activist or participatory journalism. Hearst called it the journalism of action or the journalism that acts. His newspapers would take an active role in solving the problems of contemporary life. It wouldn't just comment on it. They just wouldn't call attention to it. They would actually go out and try to resolve these problems. And in essence, the whole paper becomes the melodrama of the city in which common people are the innocents at the mercy of corrupt government officials or the police who bungle their cases.

22:56And the hero is the journal and the newspaper reporters who come in and rescue the damsel in distress, the common people. Hearst had done what he set out to do, transform journalism, first in San Francisco and now New York City. But he wasn't satisfied. Coming up, Hearst puts his thumb on Cuban politics and tips the scale.

23:33Hi, I'm Hazel Selvors from Seattle, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love your guidebook so much. It's like watching a movie in my mind. Thank you. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. This message comes from Mattress Firm. If mornings hurt, your mattress might be why. Mattress Firm's sleep experts can match you with a Tempur-Pedic Adapt. Its unique material absorbs motion and delivers pressure-relieving support.

24:15Upgrade to a Tempur-Pedic and get next-day delivery. For the great sleep you deserve, Visit Mattress Firm and learn how to get 3 % back with special financing. They make sleep easy. Restrictions apply. Next day delivery available on select mattresses and subject to location. See store for details. This message comes from Warby Parker. Prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Glasses designed in-house from premium materials starting at just$95, including prescription lenses. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you. Part 2. Jailbreak Journalism What was happening in Cuba was of great interest to readers in the United States, and especially to Hearst.

25:03Cuban revolutionaries had decided to challenge the authority of the Spanish government. Since the mid-19th century, Cubans had been rebelling against Spanish colonial rule. But in 1895, a new and stronger rebellion broke out into full-on revolution. Three years later, the conflict was at a breaking point.

25:26Karen Roggenkamp:At no time since the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution has the tension and anxiety been so great as it is at present. We are now on the very verge of war with Spain. Spain still ruled Cuba in the late 1890s, and the Spanish were trying to put down a rebellion against their colonial rule. It was not going well. For two years it had been going on, the Spanish had not been successful in shutting this down. And Spain was getting a lot of bad press in the U.S. Regional papers like the Macon Telegraph in Georgia painted grisly scenes with headlines saying things like, thousands perish there for lack of food, which is denied by Spain.