ABSTRACT
The World and the Journal chose to be entertaining; the old penny press, especially the Times after Adolph Ochs rejuvenated it in 1896, took the path of factuality. When telling stories is taken to be the role of the newspaper, journalism is said to fulfill what George Herbert Mead described as an "aesthetic" function. Rightly or wrongly, the informational ideal in journalism is associated with fairness, objectivity, scrupulous dispassion. In the critical decades from 1883 to the first years of this century, when at the same moment yellow journalism was at its height and the New York Times established itself as the most reliable and respected newspaper in the country. Party papers prevailed there until the 1870s when "independent journalism" gained a foothold. A turning point for St. Louis journalism came in 1871 when the Morning Globe hired Chicago's Joseph McCullagh as editor.
