Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/389

Rh was nothing extraordinary in the system that Pulitzer inaugurated. The papers which, in the early thirties, had been founded for the purpose of catering to the laboring classes had grown staid and conservative. A new generation of laboring people had come up, several of them in fact, and the papers that were supposed to appeal to them, appealed rather to the preceding generation. The Pulitzer journalism was, therefore, not so much the inauguration of a new system as the re-birth of an old one.

The appeal to the laboring or semi-educated classes was, as it had been in the thirties, immediately successful; as had been the case with the first penny papers, it was demonstrated that, while the World gained in circulation by hundreds of thousands, no other morning paper lost. The conservative morning papers that looked with so much horror on Pulitzer's innovations gradually found, as their predecessors had found in the case of the penny papers and the news system inaugurated by Bennett, that by adopting some of his methods they were able to increase their constituency.

It was the discovery that in New York,—or, for that matter, in every city in the country—there was a large uneducated or semi-educated population who were not reading newspapers, that led William M. Laffan, then a subordinate on the Sun and later the proprietor and editor of that paper, to bring out, on March 17, 1887, the Evening Sun, an afternoon paper that was to address itself, not to the educated class but to those less fortunately conditioned. Its success led to the Evening World, and to an entire change in the character of the evening papers of the country; so much so that the New York Evening Post, with its great traditions, is even to-day making, through large type and black headlines, the same appeal