Newspaper Journalist
While Ellen Browning was at college her brother James Edmund had become an owner and publisher of The Detroit Advertiser and merged it with the Detroit Tribune. James then convinced Ellen she should take a job as a copy editor. So she did. Ellen had to quit because of her father’s failing health. She was so concerned that she slept in a chair next to her father’s bed with a string tied to her finger so if he woke up she would get woken up. A fire in 1873 burned down the Detroit Tribune building and helped the Scripps family James Collected $20,000 from the insurance and Edward made $1000 on the melted lead type stamps. This allowed James to reinvest the money and start a new company paper The Detroit News. Ellen became copy editor again after her father’s death the same year and made approximately $20 a week. Ellen and James convinced their brother George to sell his farm and invest in the newspaper.
A rift between brothers caused Edward to move to Cleveland and in 1879 he started his own paper, The Penny Press. Even though they were splitting apart, James helped him finance the start up Edward needed about $10,000. The paper was started during a time of increasing literacy and it became hugely popular
Ellen started a column in the paper called "Miscellany". It was a column of trivial news supplemented with historical facts. This column began as a filler piece but then became well received and expected by the public. She pioneered the concept of the feature article.
Read more about this topic: Ellen Browning Scripps
Famous quotes containing the words newspaper and/or journalist:
“If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)