Editing Yellow journalism (section)

=== Coinage and early usage ===
An English magazine in 1898 noted, "All American journalism is not 'yellow', though all strictly 'up-to-date' yellow journalism is American!"<ref>Cited in '' Oxford English Dictionary '' "Yellow" sense #3</ref>

The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between [[Joseph Pulitzer]]'s ''[[New York World]]'' and [[William Randolph Hearst]]'s ''[[New York Journal]]''. The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period. Both papers were sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well. [[Richard F. Outcault]], the author of a popular cartoon strip, the [[Yellow Kid]], was tempted away from the ''World'' by Hearst and the cartoon accounted substantially towards a big increase in sales of the ''Journal''.<ref>David M. Ball, "From Immigrants to Filibusters: The Curious Case of R.F. Outcault's Yellow Kid." ''Immigrants and Comics'' (Routledge, 2021) pp.72–88. [https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315643991-4/immigrants-filibusters-david-ball Abstract].</ref>

The term was coined by Ervin Wardman,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/fake-news-in-the-1890s-yellow-journalism/sources/1771|title=A photograph of Ervin Wardman, managing editor of the *New York Press*, 1901|lang=en|website=[[Digital Public Library of America]]|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240228124907/https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/fake-news-in-the-1890s-yellow-journalism/sources/1771|archive-date=2024-02-28|access-date=2025-01-12|url-status=live}}</ref> the editor of the ''[[New York Press (historical)|New York Press]]''. Wardman was the first to publish the term but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were already used by newsmen of that time. Wardman never defined the term exactly. Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman twisted "new journalism" into "nude journalism".<ref name=Campbell/>{{rp|32–33}} Wardman had also used the expression "yellow kid journalism"<ref name=Campbell/>{{rp|32–33}} referring to [[The Yellow Kid|the then-popular comic strip]] which was published by both Pulitzer and Hearst during a circulation war.<ref name=Wood>{{harvnb|Wood|2004}}</ref>