The Broadsheet's Bold Lie: On the Discipline of the Sensationalist
Most of us who write online, trying to catch a piece of the reader’s fleeting attention, think we understand the clickbait headline. We’ve been taught to scorn it as a modern plague, a degradation of the editorial craft. But the clickbait artist’s ancestor, the master of the penny dreadful and the sensationalist broadsheet, practiced a dark and surprisingly disciplined art. To understand it is not to endorse it, but to recognize a potent, if often cynical, form of audience-building. And for that, there is perhaps no better case study than the man who arguably perfected the form in the 1830s: James Gordon Bennett Sr., founder of the New York Herald.
Bennett didn’t have social media algorithms, but he understood the human algorithm perfectly. In a crowded field of staid, partisan newspapers, he built his audience not through reasoned debate, but through orchestrated spectacle. His genius lay not in the lie itself, but in the meticulous discipline with which he deployed it. He understood that a headline was not merely an introduction to a story; it was the story’s first and most important performance.
Consider his coverage of the infamous 1836 Robinson-Jewett murder case. When a prominent man was accused of murdering a sex worker, Helen Jewett, Bennett didn’t just report the facts. He turned the inquest into a serialized drama. He published lurid, firsthand descriptions of the crime scene (which he likely fabricated), conducted ‘interviews’ with the victim’s ghost, and framed the entire event as a Gothic tale of morality and class. The public, both horrified and enthralled, bought papers in unprecedented numbers. This was not careless hackwork; it was a deliberate, disciplined strategy to create a narrative so compelling it became unavoidable.
The discipline here, a bitter pill for any writer with purist tendencies, is the ruthless subordination of truth to engagement. Bennett’s editorial craft was laser-focused on one metric: sensation. Every word, every headline, every exaggerated detail was chosen for its ability to provoke a visceral reaction—outrage, shock, morbid curiosity. He was building an audience by giving them not what they needed, but what they, at their most base level, wanted. He pioneered the ‘beat’ system not for comprehensive civic coverage, but to ensure a constant stream of salacious crime reports and society gossip.
For us today, wrestling with our own metrics and the temptation of the quick viral hit, Bennett’s legacy is a cautionary mirror. It reveals that building an audience through sheer sensation is a discipline in itself, requiring a cynical but sharp understanding of psychology and narrative. The lesson isn’t that we should emulate him, but that we must recognize the power of the tools we use. The craft of the headline, the structure of a story, the choice of angle—these are neutral forces. Bennett’s discipline was in wielding them without the burden of scruple, proving that an audience can indeed be built on a foundation of bold lies. Our own discipline, then, must be a conscious choice to wield those same tools for something more substantial, always aware of the sensationalist’s shadow lurking just a click away.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: