If you were one of the seventy-six million people in America in 1900, what you knew depended a lot on where you lived. If you were in New York, you could read Joseph Pulitzer's World, the biggest seller, or the upstart William Randolph Hearst's Journal, or Whitelaw Reid's Tribune, or Charles Dana's Sun, or James Gordon Bennett's Herald, or perhaps The New York Times, where Adolph Ochs, four years into his ownership, had quietly saved the fifty-year-old newspaper from bankruptcy. He could not afford to send anybody to report the Spanish-American war in 1898. But before long Ochs would transform the struggling Times into one of the world's greatest newspapers with its own staff in foreign capitals. By 1927 he could afford to buy exclusive rights to Lindbergh's own account of his flight to Paris. But for now Ochs relied on the ever-faithful Associated Press for his war reporting.

In New York or Chicago or San Francisco, you would have heard of Joseph Pulitzer's most curious experiment. On New Year's Eve he actually intended to hand over his great newspaper to a young Englishman with crazy ideas about "tabloid" journalism. (And indeed the January 1, 1901, issue of The World was edited by Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), founder of the Daily Mail of London, who strode through Pulitzer's newsroom all night, crying "Keep it down, gentlemen. No story of more than 250 words!") This was the same Northcliffe who in 1917 was to persuade Joseph Medill Patterson to start a tabloid, the origin of Patterson's phenomenally successful New York Illustrated Daily News launched in 1919.

Reading any one of the profusion of newspapers in New York in 1900 you would learn all about the dramas of the gold rush in the Klondike, a tidal wave in Galveston, Texas, a brutal coal strike, the American Army's guerrilla war in the Philippines. You might miss the news of a young Wilbur Wright who had got a glider five feet into the air at Kitty Hawk; it was not considered much of a story. (The Wright brothers' first powered flight was still three years away.)

The big news was the presidential election. You would know that the very nice William McKinley was leaving the campaigning for re-election to his Republican running mate, that noisy Theodore Roosevelt, and that the two were likely once again to beat the eloquent Populist William Jennings Bryan. If you read Hearst's Journal, you would learn that Mr. Bryan was a hero of the working men up against the trusts. If you read the others, or the venomous Harper's Weekly, he was a dangerous Red. You would know that the candidates were arguing mainly about whether America had been right to annex the Philippines after the Spanish-American war -- a war incited by the young Hearst and his feverish Journal, which accused Spain of blowing up the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. Joseph Pulitzer had reported the Spanish-American crisis straight, but in the battle for millions of readers had become as jingoistic as Hearst. Both papers printed fabrications.

On election night, 1900, in New York and other big cities, you could learn the voting results merely by strolling into the streets. The news organizations projected slides on huge stereopticons. Hearst was proud that he had installed extra telephones to get the returns; most of them still came by telegraph wire. In Chicago, the Tribune reported results by color-coded fireworks every hour from eight in the evening. At the end, McKinley was on his way back to the White House, and assassination by a madman, on September 6, 1901. And Hearst was to regret his reckless journalism. In an election year, 1900, he allowed contributor Ambrose Bierce to write a tasteless quatrain, occasioned by the shooting of William Goebel, the governor-elect of Kentucky:

The bullet that pierced Goebel's breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.

Hearst was hanged in effigy in many cities. But Citizen Kane was on his way to the creation of a great press empire that flourishes today.

If you were not a reader of Mr. Hearst or his competitors during that year, or anywhere near a big city, but, say, out in Bryan's home territory of Nebraska, you would know none of the above -- for quite a time, if ever.

Most families farming the Great Plains in 1900 were as parched for information as for rain. They hadn't a clue about the weather coming their way: they were twenty years away from the first commercial radio. Nor had they any way of seeing the clouds gathering in the futures markets back east in Chicago. Their knowledge of their region, of their country, of the world had to be gleaned, seed by seed, by word of mouth or perhaps from a one-man, handset newspaper coming off a flatbed press once a week in a town 200 miles away. Such smaller newspapers could not afford to have telegraphers to transcribe incoming Morse code. Many of them were dependent on the ingenuity of Kent Cooper who, as bureau manager in Indianapolis for Scripps-McRae Press and then The Associated Press, organized a relay system of hot news by telephone. The reports would be dictated continuously to notetakers in offices within 100 miles -- the first transcontinental call was not possible until 1915.

part 1: What a Century!
part 2: Alive with Social Concern
part 3: The Winter of Journalism's Discontent
part 4: Prizes, Trophies, Kudos, Triumphs
part 5: Photos, Cartoons, and Television Pictures
part 6: Trenchcoat Reporters and Foreign News
part 7: "Peeping Over the Parapet to the Next Century"

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