Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

She’d paid her dues, and now she’d gone straight. Her heroine, Aurora Leigh, dreamed of being a poet, not a stunt girl. With visions of respect and safety (no more fear of losing fingers in the mangle), she’d written one essay for the journal Nineteenth Century and hoped to do more, delving into what she considered legitimate topics of intellectual inquiry.

“I am merely going to write up the curiosities of a political campaign in America,” she told the Journal reporter.

Assignments came easy at first. Telegrams wafted in with requests for interviews and features. She spent a few months writing inoffensive (and dull) articles about the English man versus the American man. After McKinley won the battle with Bryan, she featured his family in “The Home Life of the American President.” But though writing as a special correspondent paid up to four times the usual amount, it was still freelance work: feast and famine. Before long, suffering a “financial catastrophe” that made her London poverty pale in comparison, Banks once again found herself broke.

On Newspaper Row, “sunlight, sparkling on a dome of gold” kept catching her eye. The sensational papers seemed to be printing money along with their front pages. Both owners were conspicuously wealthy and paid more than anyone else. As a result, the smartest, most talented reporters worked there. A staff position could provide the $40 a week she needed.

And they offered genuine opportunity for those of her sex. Under the World’s glittering roof, in the Hearst office pandemonium, Banks knew that “the most difficult, the most enterprising, the most sensational and the most original work on this class of papers is done by women.” Hearst, though he didn’t pontificate about women in journalism, would do whatever it took to win. Female writers equaled sales. As a result, he hired a lot of them. As a journalist wrote years later, of Hearst and women: “Hundreds of them passed through his doorways, some to lose their jobs with staggering swiftness; others to build up big syndicate names and draw down the highest salaries in the profession.” But that style of journalism still left a bad taste in Banks’s mouth. Stunt reporting and writing about the body had been a liberating choice for many, but it was becoming an imprisoning expectation. Banks had a hard time finding a well-paying assignment that didn’t involve, for example, getting arrested as a prostitute in the Tenderloin and spending the night in jail. At the beginning, stunt reporters often came up with their own ideas, but now that the demand was so great, did they have the chance to say no? At what point did opportunity become exploitation?

From its earliest days in the late 1880s, one strain of stunt reporting had been more sexual than public-spirited. Some of Nora Marks’s first ventures for the Chicago Tribune involved applying to work for a publisher of pornographic books and then as an artist’s model for a man who turned out to want to take and sell seminude photographs. An aspiring writer who arrived in Chicago as early as 1881 (she hoped to write literary essays until a magazine editor said she’d never make a living that way: “You’ll have to write about something you have seen, can describe, something no one else has done”), she was assigned to interview a train full of prostitutes and found herself mistaken for one. Female journalists whispered among themselves the story of a Chicago editor who requested that a new reporter marry a Mormon and send dispatches from Salt Lake City.

Banks wasn’t the only reporter who thought this kind of work risked damaging, not furthering, women’s careers. Florence Finch Kelly, who’d reported for the San Francisco Examiner, found the stunts embarrassing. The “clamour of the stunting sisterhood” and the headlines that shrieked “its daring and unsavory exploits to be everywhere talked about” made established writers pause before recommending journalism as a profession. She worried these antics would cause male editors to think twice before hiring women at all.*

And then there was the lack of originality. To be a stunt reporter seemed more and more to be one of a troupe of anonymous women performing the same tired tricks, and Banks felt her value as a writer was her unique perspective. Later, when discussing her autobiography with her agent, Banks insisted her individuality was a selling point. When he positioned the book as one about the tough lives of newspaperwomen in general, she reminded him that the manuscript’s significance was that it told the story of “the American Girl in London” who had lit the Thames on fire:

“My book will not go because it is by a woman journalist but because it is by ME!”

Banks also wondered about the cost of these adventures to the women who performed them. Some of the assignments risked physical harm. The peril was genuine. As one aspiring reporter asked her editor, when he suggested she sail from Europe to New York and let herself be taken in by one of the gangs that preyed on immigrant girls: “But one thing troubles me. Won’t there be real danger in it?”

The larger culture echoed her unease. Banks had been in town only a few months when the New York Press coined the term “yellow-kid journalism” in January 1897. The phrase referred to a comic-strip character popular in the World then scooped up by the Journal (while the World continued to run an imitation). The term implied cartoonish, accessible, vulgar, like the slang-speaking Yellow Kid himself. It may have had roots in the dismissive phrase “yellow-covered literature”: cheaply printed adventure novels marked by, not surprisingly, their yellow covers. Beyond the Kid’s bright shirt, the color also brought to mind diseases like yellow fever. The Indianapolis Journal in February 1897 quoted the Press under the title: “Gotham’s Great Epidemic.” It continued, “After an attack of yellow-kid journalism, New Yorkers are not going to worry about the Bombay plague.” Certainly, there seemed something feverish in the approach.

This then became “yellow journalism,”