NOTES
- New York Journal, 13 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Journal, 27 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Journal, 10 April 1901, 4.
- New York Journal, 1 June 1901, 6.
- Peter Ausenhus, “Journalism in National Crises: A Cultural History of the Garfield and McKinley Assassinations” (Master's Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1992).
- Some works about Hearst include Oliver Carlson and Ernest S. Bates, Hearst: Lord of San Simeon (New York: Viking Press, 1936); John Tebbel, The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952); W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1961); L. Chaney and M. Cieply, The Hearsts: Family and Empire—The Later Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Judith Robinson, The Hearsts: An American Dynasty (New York: Avon, 1991); J. Casserly and William Randolph Hearst Jr., The Hearsts: Father and Son (Niwot, Colo.: Rinehart, 1991); Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
- Willard Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 381.
- Robinson, The Hearsts, 328.
- Procter, William Randolph Hearst, 167–68.
- Casserly and Hearst, The Hearsts, 45–46.
- Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1962), 577–99.
- Adolph Ochs, New York Times, 19 Aug. 1896, 4.
- Robert Sobel, The Manipulators: America in the Media Age (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1976), 12. Sobel articulates a few standards, such as the concept of a free press, but he is more concerned with explaining the overall development of a separate journalistic identity.
- Douglas Birkhead, “Presenting the Press, Journalism and the Professional Project” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1982), 114.
- George Everett, “The Age of New Journalism, 1883–1900,” in The Media in America: A History, 4th ed., eds., Wm. David Sloan, James G. Stovall, and James D. Startt (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Publishing Horizons, 1999), 245.
- Will Irwin, Collier's, 4 March 1911, 20.
- Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 731.
- Mott, American Journalism, 539.
- Kalman Seigel, Talking Back to the New York Times, Letters to the Editor, 1851–1971 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 3.
- David Nord, “The Nature of Historical Research,” in Research Methods in Mass Communication, eds. Guido Stempel and Bruce Westley (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 290.
- Numerous studies have looked at the agenda-setting process, starting with Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 1972,176–87. McCombs and Shaw have updated their work, along with co-author David Weaver, in Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-Setting Theory (Mahwah,N.J.: Lawrence Erblaum, 1997). Another relevant discussion of agenda-setting was written by Michael Bruce MacKuen, “Social Communication and the Mass Policy Agenda,” in Michael Bruce MacKuen and Steven Lane Coombs, More Than News: Media Power in Public Affairs (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1981), 17–44.
- J. Clemon, “In Defense of Initials,” The Masthead 28 (1976): 17.
- Public opinion and its connection to letters to the editor is discussed by: David L. Grey and Trevor R. Brown, “Letters to the Editor. Hazy Reflections of Public Opinion,” Journalism Quarterly 47 (Autumn 1970), 450–56, 471; and Paula Cozort Renfro, “Bias in Selection of Letters to the Editor,” Journalism Quarterly 56 (Winter 1979): 822–26. The demographics of letter writers is pursued by: Sidney A. Forsythe, “An Exploratory Study of Letters to the Editor and Their Contributors,” Public Opinion Quarterly 14 (Spring 1950): 143–44; William D. Tarrant, “Who Writes Letters to the Editor?” Journalism Quarterly 34 (Fall 1957): 501–502; Gary L. Vacin, “A Study of Letter-Writers,” Journalism Quarterly 42 (Summer 1965): 502; Emmett Buell, Jr., “Eccentrics or Gladiators? People Who Write About Politics in Letters to the Editor,” Social Science Quarterly 56 (December 1975): 440–49; and David B. Hill, “Letter Opinion on ERA,” Public Opinion Quarterly 45 (Fall 1981): 384–92. The question of why people write letters is studied by: John Andrew Klempner, “People Who Write In: Communication Aspects of Opinion Letter Writing,” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1966); Byron G. Lander, “Functions of Letters to the Editor-A Re-Examination,” Journalism Quarterly 49 (Spring 1972): 142; Steve Pasternak and Suraj Kapoor, “The Letters Boom,” The Masthead 28 (Fall 1976): 17; and David Pritchard and Dan Berkowitz, “How Readers' Letters May Influence Editors and News Emphasis: A Content Analysis of 10 Newspapers, 1948–1978,” Journalism Quarterly 68 (Fall 1991): 388–95.
- Brian Thornton, “Telling It Like It Is: Letters To The Editor Discuss Journalism Ethics in 10 American Magazines, 1962, 1972, 1982 and 1992,” Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 1, (Spring 1999). Since this is an online journal, it has no page number. Also see by Thornton: “‘Gospel of Fearlessness' or ‘Outright Lies’: A Historical Examination of Magazine Letters to the Editor, 1902–1912 and 1982–1992,” American Journalism (Spring 1998): 35–55; “The Disappearing Media Ethics Debate in Letters to the Editor,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 13 (l:1998): 40–55; “Moral Force or Just the Facts: The Debate over the Standards of Journalism in the Muckraking Era,” New Jersey Journal of Communication (Fall 1995): 83–102; “Muckraking Journalists and Their Readers: Perceptions of Professionalism,” Journalism History 21 (Spring 1995): 29–41.
- Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 3.
- Casserly and Hearst, The Hearsts, 45.
- Tebbel, Life and Good Times, 198.
- Hiley H. Ward, Mainstreams of American Media History(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), 284.
- Ward, Mainstreams, 254.
- All newspaper circulation claims for this period are suspect, however, since there was no Audit Bureau of Circulation yet and no way to confirm paper circulations. See Mott, American Journalism, 537.
- For a colorful description of the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry, see James W. Barrett, The World, The Flesh and Messrs. Pulitzer (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931), 68.
- Willard G. Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 408.
- Eugene C. Harter quoted this figure in Boilerplating America: The Hidden Newspaper (New York: University Press of America, 1991), 152–54. He credited the information to the Remington Bros. Newspaper Manual (New York City, 1902), 207–208.
- Frank M. O'Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1918), 426.
- Sidney Kobre, Development of American Journalism (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Co. 1969), 269.
- The readers' and editorial writers' own words drove both the categories and coding. For example, many letter writers repeatedly discussed moral force in journalism — so that was one of the first categories established. Then other themes, such as public service emerged. Gradually nine categories were created to accommodate journalistic standards mentioned in editorials or letters to the editor. A second coder was used to test whether a letter was indeed a discussion of journalism. Each letter to the editor and editorial could be and often was coded more than once if it discussed more than one journalistic theme. Intercoder reliability, as measured by a formula described by Ole Holsti, exceeded.90 for all tests. For a description of the intercoder reliability test used here see Ole Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
- New York Journal, 8 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Sun, 8 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Sun, 9 Sept. 1901, 6.
- New York Post, 21 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Journal, 13 Sept. 1901, 4.
- John Ernest M'cann, New York Journal, 23 Sept. 1901, 4.
- J. Reeves, New York Journal, 23 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Journal, 23 Sept. 1901, 4.
- All the letters had dates written at the end, indicating when the letters were written. All were dated within a few days of publication.
- New York Post, 21 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Times, 13 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Sun, 8 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Sun, 12 Sept. 1901, 4.
- New York Sun, 25 Sept. 1901, 4.
- There are few reliable figures on how many letters to the editor each daily newspaper in New York or the United States regularly publishes. But an informal survey undertaken for this article revealed the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times published at least eight letters a day in the first week of June 1998. The Ottoway Newspaper chain published a Spring 1998 newsletter that showed how many letters were printed by each of the papers in the small chain in 1997. Here are some excerpts—the Gloucester Daily Times published 1,152 letters in 1997; the Cape Cod Times published 1,960 letters; the Medford Mail Tribune published 2,007; the New Bedford Standard-Times printed 1,264 letters; while the Salem Evening News published 1,476 letters. The Ottoway chain, which consists of nineteen dailies and six weeklies, published a total of 25,778 letters to the editor in 1997. See “The 1997 Letters Count,” Ottoway News Extra, Spring 1998, 8–9.
- “Believer in Progressive Journalism,” New York Journal, 23 Sept. 1901, 4.
- Procter writes that “mobs seized Hearst newsboys, trashing or burning their papers.” See Procter, Hearst, 168. Robinson writes that Hearst was hanged in effigy and his life repeatedly threatened in public. See Robinson, The Hearsts, 328. Hearst Jr. writes essentially the same thing in Casserly and Hearst, The Hearsts, 46, as do Carlson and Bates in Hearst, 113, and Tebbel, in Life and Good Times, 198.
- McKinley, the Martyr, Republican Party campaign brochure (Allied Printing, Albany, New York, 1901, from the Buffalo & Erie Historical Society). The brochure lists specific times and addresses of anti-Hearst protests.
- Procter, Hearst, 168.