William Randolph Hearst - New York Morning Journal

In 1895, with the financial support of his mother, he bought the failing New York Morning Journal, hiring writers like Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne and entering into a head-to-head circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of the New York World, from whom he "stole" Richard F. Outcault, the inventor of color comics, and all of Pulitzer's Sunday staff as well. Another prominent hire was James J. Montague, who came from the Portland Oregonian and started his well-known "More Truth Than Poetry" column at the Hearst-owned New York Evening Journal.

Hearst's newspaper was the only major publication in the East to support William Jennings Bryan and Bimetallism in 1896. Subsequently, the price of the Journal (later New York Journal-American) was reduced to one cent; this, coupled with the newspaper's eye-catching headlines and sensational stories on subjects like crime and pseudoscience (a style pejoratively referred to as yellow journalism—see below) allowed the newspaper to attain unprecedented levels of circulation.