During the 1880s the Sunday edition of Joseph Pulitzer's World increasingly became a collection of features, advertising, and drawings; each issue had forty-four to fifty-two pages. Circulation passed 250,000 in 1887. The young editor was Morrill Goddard, who had a talent for the feature angle on the news. He not only embellished facts but virtually created the pseudoscience articles featured in later tabloids, thus increasing the popularity of the World.

Yellow Ink.

In 1893 Pulitzer installed color presses to print the Sunday supplements, and Goddard used them to expand the comics section, which had been inaugurated in 1889. The most popular cartoon, drawn by Richard Outcault, was "Hogan's Alley," which depicted life in the tenements of New York, through the eyes of "The Kid," a jug-eared, bucktoothed toddler in a dirty nightdress. The usual yellow ink gave the pressmen a headache because it...