Sensational Kim Todd (popular books to read .txt) 📖

As he wrote a friend back home, “I had secured very remunerative employment in a lunatic asylum.” It was more than the organizational structure that gave him this impression. Though Hearst himself didn’t drink, several of his best reporters drank heavily and occasionally disappeared, needing to be hauled back from Europe or South America to write their sparkling prose. Hearst, still in his early thirties, liked to get up late, go to the opera, then saunter into the newspaper offices well after midnight and change headlines and rewrite editorials.

And, as it had in San Francisco, his method worked. One of his editors commented, “It seemed to some of us who day after day inhaled the fumes of his burning money, that he was mad, but he was only, as a matter of fact, shrewd and daring.” In the first weeks of 1896, he hired away almost the entire staff of the Sunday World at stupendous salaries. Pulitzer had done the exact same thing to his brother, Albert (to Albert’s astonishment and pain), when he entered the New York newspaper market a little over a decade before, but the knowledge didn’t ease the sting. Pulitzer and Carvalho schemed to lure the reporters and editors back, but the moment it seemed like they had, Hearst countered with even more money, and prevailed. Hearst’s entry into the New York market ended up boosting salaries at all the newspapers. It was a good time to be in the business.

The World was left reeling, facing the loss of many of the creative minds that fueled a decade of journalistic invention and market dominance. In an attempt to rebuild his depleted staff, Pulitzer promoted Arthur Brisbane to editor of the Sunday World. As London correspondent for the Sun, Brisbane made his name with his coverage of Jack the Ripper—an in-depth investigation that included a memorable tour through the poverty of Whitechapel, interviews with doctors about the criminal mind, and visits to the morgue that resulted in detailed, stomach-turning descriptions of the dead. He had been working at the World for a number of years, but now was his chance to shine. The ever-competent Elizabeth Jordan stepped in as assistant editor.

She’d already been overseeing artists and writers and editing copy for the Sunday edition in an unofficial capacity, but the new title gave her the chance to shape the direction of the paper. And Jordan found that, for her, the real adventure was in the newsroom. Writers rushed in, scribbled sentences longhand or clattered them out on typewriters. Editors ripped out paragraphs and stitched together a narrative with a slashing blue pencil. Illustrators sketched tiger snarls, a fraught glance on the face of an interview subject, gears of a pioneering machine. Crumpled drafts littered the floor. Rooms smelled of sweat, tobacco, and ink.

As an editor, she was responsible for not just the content but the look of the pages. Before the World adopted linotype machines, Jordan spent hours in the composing room. Brisbane, though smart and energetic, didn’t know much about typesetting, as quickly became apparent.

“Can I help you with the make-up, Mr. Brisbane,” she recalled asking him when he took the job.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“All of it.”

Alongside a hundred compositors, she set type into wooden frames by hand, working off dummy sheets that showed article placement, the dominant headline. Fingers moved as fast as they could, then swapped type out and started again when a reporter with new information plummeted in and the story evolved. Past midnight, exhaustion crept in. Metal plates were cast of each full page, curved to fit over printer rollers. Down in the World’s basement, the press gobbled paper and sped it through wheels with raised words on them. One plate rolled the news onto the front of the paper. Then the next stamped the news on the back. The machine cut the sheets and folded them. Stacks landed with a thump in front of newsboys, who spread the latest edition to all corners of the city.

The hypnotic rhythm of late nights; the job that changed from day to day with the news; language, whittled to its sharpest and most compact: she loved it. Jordan, warm and charismatic, made friends easily. The World was now large enough that she wasn’t the only woman in the office, as might be the case at a smaller paper in a smaller city. An 1890s photo shows her at her desk, surrounded by female colleagues, one of whom cradles a kitten. One of her newspaper-room short stories showcased the bond of these women, making their own way. In “A Point of Ethics,” female writers and editors relaxed at an apartment. One idly played the piano. Another stretched out on a rug in front of the fire. A third sprawled in an easy chair.

Jordan liked her male coworkers, too. Brisbane was a charmer with fine features and ruddy hair.

Arthur Brisbane

Arthur Brisbane portrait, Brisbane Family Papers (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)

A noted ladies’ man, he was rumored to have had an affair with Bly. (He denied it, saying their relationship was entirely professional, though he would prove to be a great friend when she needed it most.) And he did have a not particularly secret affair with Pulitzer’s wife, Katherine. Brilliant and mercurial, enthusiastic then depressed, friendly then mean, he was described by Jordan as “by turns fire and ice.” Jordan denied a crush—“I have sometimes wondered why I did not fall in love with him”*—though she gave him an entire chapter in her memoir and recalled fondly coming in each morning to find a blizzard of notes on scraps of envelopes and scratch paper, suggestions about reporting and editing that he’d pinned to the roll top of her desk. They were very good at their jobs.

Together, Brisbane and Jordan redesigned the Sunday paper, paying particular attention to the stand-alone Sunday Magazine. They added more pages, and then even more. The section was crafted explicitly for women, though not in the bonnet-and-frock way of the