ABSTRACT
In the first decades of the twentieth century, even as mainstream US newspapers were committing themselves to the new “professional” journalistic values of accuracy, neutrality, independence, and public service, some of those same papers were also regularly publishing humorous stories about whimsical events that took the outward form of standard news accounts but were clearly understood to be fictional. I explore two such series that appeared in influential metropolitan newspapers: the New York Sun's pieces about the misadventures of the good ship Wabble, whose single sidewheel doomed it to spend most of its time steaming in circles, and the New York Times's stories about a traveling caraway seed merchant who routinely encountered fantastic creatures in exotic parts of the world. In the first case, the apparently goofy stories yielded layers of meaning, messages, and pointed metajournalistic argument about the style, tactics, and credibility of journalism in an era of change. In the other case, the apparently goofy stories were in fact exactly that, and nobody paid much attention to them. A comparative analysis offers some insights into how readers and reporters together made meaning and evaluated knowledge from the surprisingly unfamiliar text that is the historical newspaper.
