America's first tabloid war; Introducing 'Buried Bones'
Plus: A WW2 turning point, Wildwood nostalgia, and more.
As I recount in BLOOD & INK, it only took a few years for Joseph Medill Patterson’s New York Daily News, founded in 1919, to break William Randolph Hearst’s stranglehold on New York City, where Hearst’s Evening Journal and New York American, once the industry’s reigning champions, were in decline. Hearst initially dismissed the tabloid craze spreading to rival publishers, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. But by the summer of 1924, as tabloids sprouted in a handful of U.S. cities, the pugilistic media kingpin had no choice but to concede his miscalculation—he needed to start his own.
Enter the New York Daily Mirror, which debuted on June 24, a positively vulgar periodical that aimed to out-tabloid the unabashedly downmarket Daily News by promising readers “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information.” Weeks later, the launch of a third New York tabloid was heralded with a bold proclamation from Bernarr Macfadden, touting a “daily newspaper that will be human all the way through.” An idiosyncratic media tycoon known for his outlandish flair, espousal of quack medicine, and barefoot walks through Manhattan, Macfadden’s publishing empire included Physical Culture, True Story, True Romances, and True Detective Mysteries. His newest creation, the outrageous New York Evening Graphic, rolled off presses on September 15, so racy that it soon earned an appropriately indecorous nickname: the PornoGraphic.
The bloody circulation battle between these O.G. tabloids would bring the 1922 Hall-Mills murder mystery back to life in July 1926, when the Mirror resurrected the case with a swashbuckling crusade. You can get a flavor of its lurid coverage from the rare front pages at the top of this post, which I obtained from the microfilm room at the New York Public Library. There’s lots more on all of this in the book, but with summer 2022 winding down, I couldn’t resist sharing this historical tidbit about the summer that sparked the tabloid wars ninety-eight years earlier.
IN OTHER NEWS…
The brooding chill of autumn is nearly upon us, and I’ll be damned if this promo art doesn’t make you want to smash the subscribe button for the new historical true crime podcast from Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, which they teased out Wednesday in a delicious two-minute trailer. Kate, as you may know, is host of the hit podcast Tenfold More Wicked and author of the fantastic books DEATH IN THE AIR, AMERICAN SHERLOCK, and the forthcoming ALL THAT IS WICKED about twisted Gilded Age killer Edward Rulloff. (Full disclosure: I blurbed ATIW and Kate blurbed B&I, as well as vetting snippets of my manuscript that pertain to one of her areas of expertise: early forensic science. Oh and I’ll soon be appearing on Kate’s other podcast, the author-interview series Wicked Words.) In Buried Bones, which drops on September 14, Kate and co-host Holes, a retired cold-case investigator, promise to “examine historical true crime cases through a 21st Century lens,” like the mysterious 1937 death of Dr. James Littlefield in South Paris, Maine; the notorious “Prince of Poisoners” who terrorized Dickensian England; and the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield. As a former editor of mine would say: inject it into my veins. Listen for yourself below:
ELSEWHERE…
“How Germany's Defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad Turned WWII Around” [History]
“The First Forays of a Czech Double Agent at the Dawn of the Cold War In Prague” [Crime Reads]
“How a trip to D.C. helped James Baldwin affirm his Southern identity” [Retropolis]
“Alfred Packer: The Colorado Cannibal” [Crimes of the Centuries]
“How Prince Charles Sought Revenge Against Princess Diana and the Palace” [Vanity Fair]
“A Devilish Hoax: The Fake Demonic Possession of Martha Brossier” [Mental Floss]
I hope you’re making the most of these waning days of August. Enjoy them by taking a stroll down memory lane with this criminally obscure 1994 documentary about the Wildwood boardwalk, which transports me back to the summers of my youth (minus the coarse outer-Philly accents and juvenile delinquency). More soon!