It’s the birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born newspaperman whose influence largely made American newspapers what they are today. He was also the first to establish a university-level school of journalism and founded the Nobel Prize. (Okay, no. But apparently a lot of people think this. There is a statement at the Pulitzer web site that “The Nobel Prizes are in no way affiliated with The Pulitzer Prizes.”)

Pulitzer was born in Makó, Hungary, in 1847 and grew up in Budapest but came to the U.S. at the age of 17 as a recruit for the U.S. Union Army; he had poor eyesight and poor health and was first rejected by several other armies. (Just think: if one of them had had standards as low as we did, they’d be handing out Pulitzers in India or Mexico.)  After the Civil War, Pulitzer landed in St. Louis, where he worked at various odd jobs and learned English. One day at the Mercantile Library, he commented on someone else’s chess game and the players, two editors of the Westliche Post, ended up offering him a job. Within a few years he bought into the paper, and a few years after that he bought and merged the St. Louis Dispatch and the Post. Through the Post-Dispatch, he attacked government corruption and positioned his paper as a champion of the people. Its popularity soared.

But Pulitzer worked too hard and his health tanked, besides which one of his reporters shot and killed a congressional candidate with whom the paper had political differences, so things in St. Louis got awkward. Pulitzer and his wife moved to New York City where as a change of pace he worked insanely hard at the New York World, which he purchased from Jay Gould (1883). Pulitzer continued to engage in investigative journalism but also in flagrant sensationalism to boost sales. (Fun fact: Pulitzer is the one who started including comics in the newspaper.) At a circulation of over 600,000, his paper was the largest in the country.

More unpleasantness: the publisher of The Sun, jealous of Pulitzer’s success, began attacking him as “the Jew who had denied his race and religion.” Pulitzer’s health continued to worsen—failing eyesight, asthma, diabetes, and a hypersensitivity to noise. In 1887, he gave up management of his papers, in 1890 he gave up editorship. He was still closely enough involved with his papers to engage in a circulation battle against William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Both papers ran fabricated stories about the Spanish-American War (1898), and the term “yellow journalism” was coined. Pulitzer backed off of this after the war.

Pulitzer died on Oct. 29, 1911, on his yacht off the coast of South Carolina. In his will, he left $2 million for Columbia University to start a School of Journalism and $500,000 to establish the Pulitzer Prizes in American journalism, letters, and music. There are currently 21 Pulitzers awarded each year. Winners receive $15,000 in cash and a certificate (yes! You get a certificate!), except for the Public Service category of Journalism, which gets a gold medal. Click here to enter yourself or a friend to win a Pulitzer.

Have a pleasant Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.