Sensationalism, Tabloids, Gossip, and Celebrity Journalism
Abramson, Phyllis, Leslie. Sob Sister Journalism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Anthony, David. Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
“Are Tabloid Newspapers a Menace?” Forum 77 (April 1927): 485-501.
Banks, Elizabeth L. “American Yellow Journalism.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review (August 1898): 328-340.
Barbas, Samantha. Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Notorious Scandal Magazine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018.
Bernhardt, Mark. “The Selling of Sex, Sleaze, Scuttlebutt, and Other Shocking Sensations: The Evolution of New Journalism in San Francisco, 1887-1900.” American Journalism 28, no. 4 (2011): 111–142.
Bessie, Simon M. Jazz Journalism: The Story of the Tabloid Newspapers. New York: Russell & Russell, 1969.
Bird, S. Elizabeth, and Robert W. Dardenne. “News and Storytelling in American Culture: Re-evaluating the Sensational Dimension.” Journal of American Culture 13 (Summer 1990): 33-37.
Bird, S. Elizabeth. For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Brazil, John R. “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America.” American Quarterly 33:2 (1981): 163-84.
Brodkey, Harold. “The Last Word on Winchell.” New Yorker, 30 January 1995, 71-78.
Brooks, Sydney. “The American Yellow Press.” The Living Age 272 (1912): 67-76.
Budd, Louis J. “Color Him Curious About Yellow Journalism: Mark Twain and the New York Press.” Journal of Popular Culture 15:2 (1981): 25-33.
Calder, Iain. The Untold Story: My Twenty Years Running the National Enquirer. New York: Mirmax Books, 2004.
Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.
Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008
Chapman, John. Tell it to Sweeney: An Informal History of the New York Daily News. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
Cohen, Lester. The New York Graphic: The World’s Zaniest Newspaper. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1964.
Commander, Lydia K. “The Significance of Yellow Journalism.” Arena 34 (August 1905).
deRochemont, Richard G. “The Tabloids.” American Mercury (October 1926).
Endres, Kathleen L. “The Feminism of Bernarr Macfadden: Physical Culture Magazine and the Empowerment of Women.” Media History Monographs 13:2 (2011): 1-14.
Ernst, Robert. Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr MacFadden. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. (New York Evening Graphic)
Evensen, Bruce J. When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age. Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1996.
Feeley, Kathleen A. “Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: The Rise of the Celebrity Gossip Industry in Twentieth Century America.” PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2004.
Fitzpatrick, Shannon. True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022.
Franke, Warren T. “An Argument in Defense of Sensationalism: Probing the Popular and Historiographical Concept.” Journalism History 5 (1978): 70-73.
Gabler, Neal. Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Gauvreau, Emil. Hot News. New York: Macaulay, 1931. (New York tabloid scene)
Gauvreau, Emil. My Last Million Readers. New York: Dutton, 1941. (NY Evening Graphic, Mirror)
Glynn, Kevin. Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Gorn, Elliot J. “The Wicked World: The National Police Gazette and Gilded Age America.” Media Studies Journal 6:1 (Winter 1992): 1-15.
Greenberg, Gerald S. Tabloid Journalism: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Holley, Val. Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Hughes, Sarah. “American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970-2000.” Journal of American Studies51:3 (2017): 692-729.
Inglis, Fred. A Short History of Celebrity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Jackson, Jessica E. “Sensationalism in the Newsroom: Its Yellow Beginnings, the Nineteenth Century Legal Transformation, and the Current Seizure of the American Press.” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy 19 (no. 2, 2005): 789-816.
Kirby, Terry. The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism. London: Reaktion Books, 2024. Mostly about UK media, but includes some on US
Knight, Denise D. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Randolph Hearst, and the Practice of Ethical Journalism.” American Journalism 11, no. 4 (1994): 336–347.
Lutes, Jean M. “Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth Century America.” American Quarterly 54 (June 2002): 217-253.
Lutes, Jean M. “Sob Sisterism Revisited.” American Literary History 15 (Fall 2003): 504-532.
McDonough, Daniel. “Chicago Press Treatment of the Gangster, 1934-1931.” Illinois Historical Journal 82 (1989): 17-32.
Macfaden, Mary, and Emil Gauvreau. Dumbells and Carrot Stripes: The Story of Bernarr Macfadden. New York: Holt, 1953.
McGivena, Leo E. The News: The First 50 Years of New York’s Picture Newspaper. New York: News Syndicate Co., 1969.
McGraw, John P. “A History of the National Enquirer.” PhD dissertation, Southern Mississippi, 2000.
Mallere, Frank. Sauce for the Gander. White Plains: Baldwin Books, 1954. (history of NY Evening Graphic)
Michal, Eileen M. “Picture-Loving: Photomechanical Reproduction and Celebrity in America’s Gilded Age.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008.
Miller, Douglas W. “The New York Tabloids.” Journalism Quarterly 5 (1928): 36-41.
Morton, Paula E. Tabloid Valley: Supermarket News and American Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.
Mosedale, John. The Men Who Invented Broadway: Daymon Runyon, Walter Winchell, and their World. New York: Marek, 1981.
Oursler, Fulton. The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden. New York: Lewis Copeland, 1929.
Parsons, Louella. Tell it To Louella. New York: Putnam’s, 1961.
Pompeo, Joe. Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime. New York: William Morrow, 2022.
Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Reel, Guy. “This Wicked World: Masculinities and Portrayals of Sex, Crime, and Sports in the National Police Gazette, 18791906.” American Journalism 22 (Winter 2005): 61-94.
Riffenburgh, Beau. The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery. New York: Belhaven, 1993.
Sachsman, David B., and David W. Bulla, eds. Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th Century Reporting. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2013.
Scott, Henry E. Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine. New York: Pantheon, 2010.
Shaw, Donald L., and John W. Slater. “In the Eye of the Beholder?: Sensationalism in American Press News, 1820-1860.” Journalism History 12 (Winter 1985): 86-91.
Shoplik, Anthony. “Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the ‘Colyumn’: Sophistication, Publicity, and Jazz Journalism.” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 13:2 (2022): 276-298.
Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Sloan, Bill. I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!: A Colorful History of Tabloids and their Cultural Impact. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001.
Smith, Gene, and Jane Barry Smith, eds. The Police Gazette. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Stevens, John D. Sensationalism and the New York Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Thomas, Bob. Winchell. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
Wallace, Aurora. “Tabloids and the City: The New York Daily News, the New York Daily Mirror, and the New York Evening Graphic.” Chapter 1 of Newspapers and the Making of Modern America: A History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Wallach, Glenn. “A Depraved Taste for Publicity: The Press and Private Life in the Gilded Age.” American Studies 39:1 (Spring 1998): 31-57.
Wardle, Claire. “Monsters and Angels: A Comparison of Broadsheet and Tabloid Press Coverage of Child Murders from the US and UK, 1930–2000.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2004.
Weiner, Ed. Let’s Go to Press: A Biography of Walter Winchell. New York: Putnam’s, 1955.
Welky, David. “We Are the People!: Idealized Working Class Society in the National Police Gazette.” Mid-Ameican 84 (Winter 2002): 101-27.
Weston, Mary Ann. “The Daily Illustrated Times: Chicago’s Tabloid Newspaper.” Journalism History 16:3/4 (Summer-Autumn 1989): 76-86.
Wiltenburg, Joy. “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism.” American Historical Review 109: 5 (December 2004): 1377-1403.
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