Joseph Pulitzer is the granddaddy of modern media code.
Recognize the name? The Pulitzer Prize is the ranking award in the journalism profession, but not the career equivalent of the Oscar, which does light-years more for the winner's media codes than a Pulitzer Prize does. That is not to say I would complain if I won a Pulitzer. It would make me much more famous than I am now, which is an extremely valuable, but also risky, media code. But people wouldn't recognize me on the streets, the way they would Oscar-winner Russell Crowe, which adds millions to the fan base, and thus millions to the paycheck.
The media codes were in full development in the media in the 1870s, when Pulitzer came along, but no one had ever used them quite the way he did. He recognized the power of the media codes to manipulate response and build that into a business plan, which revolutionized the media as a business and set into motion what today we call sensational, and tabloid, media. If you want to view Pulitzer's genius first-hand, find a page or a screen showing Paris Hilton's picture, and look into her eyes. What is in there? Nothing. Why are you looking into them? That is the genius of Joseph Pulitzer, embedded there.
Because the Pulitzers and Paris Hilton both started with him, media historians pat Pulitzer's back with one hand, and slap him with the other. He was an immigrant, an Austrian, who worked in newspapers and then found his way into publishing in St. Louis, in the 1870s. He founded The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, still in business 130 years later and, on its website, still embracing as its platform these words from Pulitzer written at his retirement in 1907: "I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."
That was the pat-on-the-back Pulitzer. Joseph Pulitzer's mission as a publisher was to give his readers quality, responsible journalism that would make a difference in their lives and in their communities. The historians call it the birth of a "new journalism," and Pulitzer worked so hard to set the new standard, with the Post-Dispatch and later The New York World, that at the time of his retirement, he was blind, and afflicted with a nervous disorder so severe he could tolerate only the softest sounds.
Pulitzer, as he went to work as The Post-Democrat's publisher in 1878, also knew all that noble journalism wasn't going to make a difference to anybody if the readers didn't pick the paper up. So he attracted readers to the paper by manipulating them. Readers, he understood, were both useful and usable. Useful as informed citizens, which was the noble part, and usable as humans who could be persuaded, through strong forces they might not understand, to pick up a newspaper, just as you were persuaded by the bare curves of a beautiful leg to pick up this book. That was the business part, and it is still in wide use today. It is called the "Pulitzer rationale:" use crass manipulation on the front pages to sell the paper, at which point you have placed quality, responsible journalism in the reader's hands.
I say "crass;" manipulation is manipulation. But some types of manipulation are legitimate. Some stories and images are so powerful that the viewer can't resist being drawn in, even if he or she is simultaneously repelled. The sequence of images from the morning of 9/11, produced and directed by media code experts in Al Qaeda, is the reigning example of such power. The attraction can also be as subtle as National Geographic's photo of a beautiful Afghan girl, or a gentle story about octogenarians being married in their hospital beds. It can be as standard as wildfires raging through national forests, or a last-second pass deflection caught and carried forward for the winning touchdown, which a legion of Americans remember four decades later as "The Immaculate Deflection." Some things that happen are simply sensational. It is an extremely useful media code.
It is so useful, in fact, that media producers look for ordinary things that happen that can be made to look sensational, by tweaking the facts in some way, or a bit of artful misrepresentation, or perhaps stretching the truth slightly, or by outright lies, so long as nobody is libeled. This kind of sensationalism is at the heart of what is called tabloid media, for which there is a huge audience. For this, media guardians reach back in history and slap Joseph Pulitzer a good one on the side of his head.
But artful sensationalism shows up every day in legitimate, mainstream media. It can be as simple as a huge headline on the newspaper editions that are sold in vending machines on the streets. The headline is sized big enough to be read from a distance of 25 or 30 feet. Why? To catch the eye, and the curiosity of a potential customer who otherwise might have kept on walking. Pulitzer used that trick all the time, but not so effectively as his New York newspaper publishing enemy, William Randolph Hearst.
Pulitzer knew something else about readers being usable. He made his newspapers more appealing by making them appealing in more ways. The media codes are like DNA. All DNA is made of the same stuff, but it combines itself in unique ways that make us who we are. Media codes are all the same stuff, but show up in people in combinations that create specific interests which can be marketed to. These combinations are based not only on individual tastes, but on sex, age, income, ethnicity, nationality, education, all those groupings that today we call "demographics."
Pulitzer recognized and seized the business advantage of publishing a newspaper not for an audience, but for a group of audiences. He introduced "sections," focused on a range of demographic interests. His New York World featured national news, local news, city hall, government, business, Wall Street, editorials, sports, theater, books, music, food, homemaking, gardening, fashion, society, weddings, weather, color comics, crosswords, games, stunts.
Stunts? There has always been a substantial demographic who liked stunts, which tend to be strange and dangle an element of the unknown. In the 21st century, they have become the foundation for television reality shows. You don't see many stunt features anymore in newspapers, or that have actually been produced by the newspaper. That has become too lowbrow for the serious press. But if someone came along named Evel Knievel and launched himself on a motorcycle over a couple dozen cars side-by-side, that photo might find its way onto the front page of many serious newspapers.
Pulitzer's most memorable stunt involved a woman, and therein lay another lode of code. Even in New York, in 1887 women were expected to remain in what was then called the woman's world. Pulitzer made good use of that demographic with the sections devoted to fashion, home, garden, society. Then along came Elizabeth Cochrane, young and pretty and not at all interested in remaining behind a white picket fence. She was a very good reporter with a strong grasp of media code. Nobody had ever heard of Elizabeth Cochrane, so in the paper, she made herself more famous by using the byline "Nellie Bly," a name from a popular Stephen Foster song. She attracted readers by doing rough, totally unexpected stories, including a famous investigative story in which she faked being insane, spent 10 days in an asylum, and reported gruesome facts of the treatment of women there. The story was sensational, and caused a sensation, and an embarrassing official investigation.
It made Nellie Bly genuinely famous, and famous women newspaper reporters had rare value in the late 19th century. Pulitzer knew just what to do. He sent her around the world. Jules Verne had written a popular fantasy novel, "Around the World in 80 Days." Pulitzer decided to bet his readers it could actually be done, and not by a man, but a woman, making the stunt's media code doubly outrageous and 10 times as seductive. The paper ran a contest to guess her elapsed time, which attracted more than a million entries. When Nellie Bly completed the trip in 72 days, the stunt became real change, and therefore real news, that was reported in newspapers nationwide.
The year was 1889. People wanting to follow Nellie Bly's around-the-world adventure had to read about it in the newspaper. But as Pulitzer was introducing modern media code and the "new journalism," elsewhere in New York a researcher named Nikola Tesla was opening a laboratory to experiment with sending voices through the air from a transmitter to a receiver. In 1891, at penny arcades in New York City, Thomas Edison, with patents already on electric light and recording, introduced a machine called the kinetograph, that made pictures appear to move. In Europe and America, scientists were working with spinning discs, mirrors, electricity and selenium, a chemical element with interesting conductive properties, in pursuit of the growing conviction among researchers that not only voices, but pictures, could be transmitted through the air. How quiet the sky must have been, at the close of the 19th century. With the first tendrils of media code escaping off pages into the air, immediately finding sensational new form and dimension, the silence could not last long.
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