Book Club Book makes it into Master’s Class Paper

Today the Avondale United Methodist Church Book Club discussed Paul Collins’ The Murder of the Century, a story of a grisly murder in 1897 New York City. It was generally agreed by the group to be a good read.

What I didn’t mention in the discussion, is that I used the book in a section of my final paper for the communications masters class on media and technology that I just completed. As a teaser for that, see the excerpt below:

For a first example of the nascent main versus alternative media, I reviewed Paul Collins’ The Murder of the Century, a story of a grisly murder in 1897 New York City, and the media war it created between the newspapers of the time. While not a scholarly work on newspapers and media of the era, the tale of this case, and how its coverage in the newspapers of the day changed the mediascape of the time, is a good background for the alleged dichotomy of today’s mass media and online user-created content.

In describing the news of the time, Collins mentions the “yellow papers of  Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal, the respectable papers like the Herald and the Sun, and the runts like the Post and the Times” (Collins, 2011, P. 3).

There was a sense of “legitimate” vs. “sensational” journalism, but it was the sensational that was in the ascent. By the end of the case the yellow journalism papers were trouncing the others in competition. A year later, at the end of 1898, Hearst’s Journal  was considered by some to be more influential than politicians and the government, significantly influencing the United States to start the Spanish-American War — considered by some “The Journal’s War” (Collins 247).

That blurb above, of course, doesn’t even touch on the case itself, which was a very interesting look at the state of police forensics at the time, and the changes that were occurring.  From any angle, the news wars, the crime investigation, the way it was handled in the courts, this book is an interesting study, in addition to being a great human interest story.

So our general agreement was to recommend the book if someone asked us.