Publishers noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
An immigrant who cannot speak English is turned out of a hotel in the Financial District across from City Hall. Twenty years later, he buys the hotel, demolishes it, and replaces it with the world’s tallest tower, to house the city’s largest-circulation newspaper, which he owns.
Such was the very American story of publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who arrived in America in 1864 as a recruit picked up off the streets of Germany to fight for the Union Army and then made his way to the pinnacle of America’s newspaper world. By 1878, he owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Facing some bad karma after his managing editor shot an upset reader, Pulitzer relocated to Manhattan and bought the New York World from Jay Gould in 1883. In the first issue published with Pulitzer as publisher, he announced the paper would be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates,” and the people responded: within three months the World ’s circulation had doubled. Channeling today’s social…