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story. “The public,” he reminded his staff, “likes entertainment better than it likes information.”
    A generation younger than Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst represented everything his Park Row neighbor was not: He was young, native-born, and the scion of a California senator and mining baron. Hearst seemed to have careless wealth written upon him, right downto the$20 gold piece he used for a tiepin. At Harvard he’d shown more interest in newsrooms than in his studies, and after presenting his professors withpiss pots emblazoned with their portraits, he was booted out of the school. But no matter; he slummed around as a freelancer for the newly launched
World
, carefully observing the business. Pulitzer, he believed, had invented a whole new way to make a fortune from journalism.
    “I am possessed of the weakness which at some time or other of their lives possesses most men,” he wrote to his father. “I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully.”
    A decade later, he’d lifted Pulitzer’s ideas to remake the scrawny
San Francisco Examiner
into the country’s fourth-largest paper and bought the near-worthless
New York Journal
—“thechambermaid’s delight,” some called it—to turn it into a juggernaut of high-speed presses and color graphics and sensational headlines. He mocked rivals as doddering dinosaurs stuck “in the Silurian era.” His comics pages were blazingly ornate and complicated print jobs; perfecting them chewed through equipment, though demolishing new presses was a price that Hearst was happy to pay. “Smash as many as you have to, George,” he instructed his printer. Now Hearst had the best color Sunday supplement in the country—page after page of
The Yellow Kid
, the adventures of
The Katzenjammer Kids
, and
Happy Hooligan
—“eight pages of iridescentpolychromous effervescence,” his paper boasted, “that makes the rainbow look like lead pipe.”
    His headlines were equally colorful, especially for the wilder
Evening Journal
edition. THEMAN WITH THE MUSICAL STOMACH , proclaimed one, while a particularly fine science story announced that A GENIUS HAS CONCEIVED A PLAN FOR A MACHINE THAT WILL KILL EVERYBODY IN SIGHT . A good headline could always be ginned up; even a bizarre old 1856 French undertaker’s patent for the “Application of Galvanoplating to the Human Flesh” might yield the splendid DROP DEAD AND HAVE YOURSELF PLATED . It wasn’t the best quality journalism, granted, but it was the best
quantity
journalism. At an unheard-of cover price of one cent, the paper could proudly display its motto: “You Can’t Get More News; You Can’t Pay Less Than One Cent.”
    And that night, you couldn’t get more on the river murder. Hearst proudly looked over an
Evening Journal
whose front page boasted lavish illustrations of both sides of a dead man’s hand, the entire forearm—and a close-up of the wounded fingernail—
and
a “butcher’s diagram” showing exactly how the body had been cut up. The next page was given over to a pictorial tour of the infamous Ogden’s Woods and the East Eleventh Street pier, plus a complete list of current missing persons with their identifying marks. Column after column of crew reporting covered witnesses, the police chief, the coroner, and the invaluable Mr. Lutz.
    Hearst barely had time to enjoy his grisly triumph whenword arrived of the upcoming four o’clock
World
.
    He had his spies in neighboring pressrooms, of course—he liked to know what his competitors were about to publish. But that evening’s final edition of the
World
, stuffed with illustrations and columns about the case, had a real shocker right up front:
    $500 REWARD
    The
World
will pay $500 in gold for the correct solution of the mystery concerning the fragments of a man’s body discovered Saturday and Sunday in the East River and in Harlem. All theories and suggestions must be sent to the City Editor of the
World
, in envelopes marked ‘Murder