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The New York Journal American was a newspaper (at the time called the New York Journal) purchased by William Randolph Hearst in 1895. Mr. Hearst, the priveleged and entitled son of a wealthy mining tycoon, was already established in the newspaper business in San Fransisco and ventured to New York to expand his empire.
Mr. Hearst was a man who always got what he wanted, usually by means of his endless supply of money. Upon arrival to New York, in a move to gain a competetive advantage over the city's dominant New York World newspaper, Mr. Hearst literally purchased the leading employees of New York World. This move, coupled with the New York Journal's penchant for delivering a more sensational style of journalism (dubbed yellow journalism, helped buoy Mr. Hearst's newspaper to the highest level of circulation within New York.
While running this newspaper, Mr. Hearst was legendary for saying that he determined what the people would think and that he created the news. Some of his tactics for such included hiring a woman to collapse at random places in the street and hiring a man to jump off a bridge to determine how long it would take for the city to rescue him. The newspaper took on a more precipitous and ambitious effort when it attempted to instigate the Spanish-American War. When one of the Journal's photographer/journalists in Cuba reported that there was no war to report on and that he wished to come back to the United States, Hearst was famously quoted as saying "You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war."
The New York Journal and Mr. Hearst's rise to power with the help of this newspaper was the subject of a dramatized semi-biographical movie titled Citizen Kane. This movie, acclaimed by many to be the greatest movie ever made, receieved violent opposition from Mr. Hearst and scarcely survived the controversy. Hearst's chief gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, was ordered by Hearst to discredit the movie whenever possible, including at the preview. The write/director/actor of this film,Orson Welles, was so effectively blacklisted from Mr. Hearst's threats to the industry, that Mr. Welles' once promising film career was virtually shattered.
The newspaper ceased publishing in 1966.
External Links
Guide to an Archived Collection of the Journal-American (http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/books/holdings/nyja/)
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