Let’s bring back yellow journalism

At a time of crisis for newspapers, leading U.S. broadsheets seem to be trying to out-bore each other, argues Jack Shafer of Slate.com (the same could be said of Canadian papers, which pale next to their incarnations during the paper war of the late 1990s and early 2000s). Whether naked sensation would halt the slide is debatable. But a little unabashed activism of the sort favoured by Pulitzer and Hearst at the turn of the 19th century wouldn’t hurt, Shafer argues: "I wish our better newspapers availed themselves of some of the techniques of yellow journalism and a little less of the solemnity we associate with the Committee of Concerned Journalists." 

Slate