Comics
In the early 1900s, Hearst weekday morning and afternoon papers around the country featured scattered black-and-white comic strips, and on January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comics page in the Evening Journal. A year later, on January 12, 1913, McManus launched his Bringing Up Father comic strip. The comics expanded into two full pages daily and a 12-page Sunday color section with leading King Features Syndicate strips. By the mid-1940s, the newspaper's Sunday comics included Bringing Up Father, Blondie, a full-page Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, The Little King, Buz Sawyer, Feg Murray's Seein' Stars, Tim Tyler's Luck, Gene Ahern's Room and Board and The Squirrel Cage, The Phantom, Jungle Jim, Tillie the Toiler, Little Annie Rooney, Little Iodine, Bob Green's The Lone Ranger, Believe It or Not!, Uncle Remus, Dinglehoofer and His Dog, Donald Duck, Tippie, Right Around Home, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and The Katzenjammer Kids.
In 1922, the Evening Journal introduced a Saturday color comics tabloid with strips not seen on Sunday, and this 12-page tabloid continued for decades, offering Popeye, Grandma, Don Tobin's The Little Woman, Mandrake the Magician, Don Flowers' Glamor Girls, Grin and Bear It and Buck Rogers and other strips.
The Evening Journal was home to famed investigative reporter Nellie Bly, who began writing for the paper in 1914 as a war correspondent from the battlefields of World War I. Bly eventually returned to the United States and was given her own column that she wrote right up until her death in 1922.
Rube Goldberg was a later cartoonist with the Journal-American. Popular columnists were O. O. McIntyre, Dorothy Kilgallen and Jimmy Cannon, one of the highest paid sports columnists in the country. Beginning in 1938, Max Kase (1898–1974) was the sports editor for 28 years, and the fashion editor was Robin Chandler Duke. The newspaper was famous for its many photographs with the "Journal-American Photo" credit line.
With one of the highest circulations in New York in the 1950s, it nevertheless had difficulties attracting advertising. The newspaper enlisted Dr. Joyce Brothers to write front-page articles in 1964 analyzing the Beatles. While the Beatles were filming Help! in the Bahamas, columnist Phyllis Battelle interviewed them for articles that ran on the Journal-American front page and in other Hearst papers, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner for four consecutive days, from April 25 to 28, 1965.
Besides trouble with advertisers, another major factor that led to the paper's demise was a power struggle between Hearst CEO Richard E. Berlin and two of Hearst's sons, who had trouble carrying on the father's legacy after his 1951 death. William Randolph Hearst, Jr. claimed in 1991 that Berlin, who died in 1986, had suffered from Alzheimer's disease starting in the mid-1960s and that caused him to shut down several Hearst newspapers without just cause.
Read more about this topic: New York Journal-American