Joseph Pulitzer

David Senra, reading Bloomberg by Bloomberg, says Michael Bloomberg started Bloomberg News after Matt Winkler told him to put text on top of the bond information already on the terminal. Bloomberg had asked, on a phone call, whether the company should enter text news so the terminal would matter to stock traders as well as bond traders. Winkler said the terminal already explained why bonds move each minute, each day, and each week better than any collection of reporters, and already supplied the charts and graphs behind major debt trades. Add text, he said, and the result would not exist anywhere else. No one in debt or equity would be able to live without it.

Bloomberg checked that move ag

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer raised the money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal in the New York World, and the campaign sent the paper's circulation soaring. France had paid for the statue. The United States was supposed to pay for the pedestal. By the time Pulitzer got involved, the fundraising had died and they were short by over $100,000. He treated it as mass crowdfunding. A penny or two pennies was enough, and every donor's name would be printed in the paper. More than 120,000 people gave. In less than five months he raised the money required. Morris writes that the public service was also good for business.

That attention fit a paper Pulitzer had

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World by going nearly $500,000 into debt for a paper that had never made a dime. He had no plan to stay in St. Louis. New York was the center of the world, and he was waiting until he could buy a paper there. Jay Gould, a railroad baron Senra says he has already done episodes on, had acquired the World by accident when he bought another company's assets and wanted the burden gone. Gould said he never cared about the paper. It had not made a dime in the four years he owned it. Circulation was an anemic 15,000, and it was losing money every week.

Signing the contract put Pulitzer nearly $500,000 in debt. Less

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer bought the hotel that used to kick him out of the lobby when he was homeless. He slept outside. 23 years later, the former derelict owned the place.

He and his wife stayed married for 30 years and barely spent any time together. Pulitzer worked all the time, while his wife spent her time in society and made news buying jewelry and houses. She drew criticism for having some of the most expensive jewelry in the world. One newspaper defended her and spelled out the climb: 30 years earlier her husband was shoveling coal and driving drays, and his indomitable energy and active brain had placed him where he could afford to buy out ha

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says evening newspapers outsold morning ones within a few years because the telegraph and faster printing presses made it possible to publish an afternoon newspaper with news as fresh as that day. Morning papers looked as if they were publishing yesterday news, which they were. Gaslight and then electric light also made the newspaper an important evening pastime.

The breakup of Joseph Pulitzer's partnership was put down to an incompatibility of temper brought on by an excess of talent. People did not work with Pulitzer. They worked for him, and often against him. He had excessive confidence in his own judgment. He thought he knew a lot about the in

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer bought a St. Louis newspaper for only $2,500 by hiring someone else to bid, a stand-in he called a Trojan horse. Pulitzer knew that an open bid would tell rivals he had spotted value they had missed, and the price would soar. The last time he bought a paper at auction in St. Louis, he flipped it for a $20,000 profit in 48 hours.

The $2,500 price was not the real problem. The paper was losing so much money that Pulitzer added up the cash he had left and the weekly losses and concluded he would run out of money in 17 weeks if he could not turn it around. Three evening papers were competing in St. Louis, so he immediately convince

David Senra says James J. Hill's advantage was that he understood the railroad as an operating business, not as a financial instrument. James J. Hill is the only person in American history to found a railroad and not go bankrupt. Most of his competitors came from finance or speculation. They were often trying to build railroads to capture land grants, sell bonds, manipulate stock, or reorganize bankrupt systems. Hill came from freight, warehousing, and transportation logistics. When he finally got control of a railroad, he understood the customer, the cargo, the routes, the costs, the bottlenecks, and the economics from the inside.

Reading James McGrath Morris, Senra says the same edge show

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer borrowed about $5,000 to buy into a St. Louis newspaper at 25, and a year later the owners bought him out for about $30,000, six times the original stake.

Pulitzer had already worked on the staff for five years and was its most valuable member, on the job 16 hours a day. In his own account, the owners thought he was necessary to the paper and would probably have done the same thing for any other man who worked 16 hours a day. Seven years after he first read the paper while looking for work in St. Louis, he became an American newspaper publisher. He did not have the $5,000, so he went into debt. Buying into the newspaper was one

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer fired on the lobbyist Augustine in a bar after each man called the other a liar and Augustine advanced on him. Still in his early 20s, Pulitzer had been nominated for Congress and used his newspaper to help himself get elected. In only five years he had grown from a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker, and he kept reporting after he took the seat so his stories could advance his political work.

He treated lobbyists at the Capitol as an army of darkness and attacked them in print as corrupt. Augustine, a giant of something like 300 pounds, answered in person. Pulitzer told him never to speak to him again. A

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says the deaths in Joseph Pulitzer's family left him obsessed with his health until the end of his life. Every ailment, no matter how small, came with an underlying fear that he was dying.

Pulitzer was born in Hungary. By the time he was 17, he had endured the death of his father and seven out of his eight siblings. His father, a successful merchant who hired tutors for his children, died of tuberculosis at 47, at the peak of his business success. Pulitzer had been nine when his older brother died, 10 when his younger brothers and sister died, 11 when his father died, and 13 at the death of his last sister. His father's death plunged the family int