Joseph Pulitzer

Hungarian-American newspaper publisher and politician (1847-1911)

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Lived 1847–1911, aged 64United States

United States PoliticiansPolitician

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71 languages
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Era
1847–1911
Aged 64

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

His name crowns American journalism's most prestigious awards, but he made his fortune pioneering the opposite: sensationalist yellow journalism that flooded newsstands with scandal, crime, and graphic horror to move a million papers a day.

Biography

About

Pulitzer arrived from Hungary and built his power base through two major newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, while serving one term in Congress as a Democrat representing New York's 9th district. In the 1890s, locked in brutal competition with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, he perfected yellow journalism — sensationalism, sex, crime, and lurid spectacle that pushed circulation to a million copies daily and reshaped the economics of American newspapers, making them dependent on advertising revenue rather than cover price or party money. Before he died in…

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