Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

All the News Is Fit to Print: Profile of a Country Editor. By Chad Stebbins. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. xii, 184 pp. $24.95, isbn 0-8262-1163-1.)

For those who think that tabloid journalism is an urban phenomenon, Chad Stebbins tells the intriguing story of the Missouri Lamar Democrat. As published and edited for nearly fifty years by Arthur Aull, it flourished by offering up the area's scandals in exhaustive detail, on top of the more prosaic news of a typical country town. A former schoolteacher and county official, Aull had no journalistic experience before buying the Democrat in 1900, but he had observed the success of the new style of journalism practiced by William Randolph Hearst and concluded that it succeeded "because it meets the requirements of the people." Translated to the unlikely venue of a town of 2,300, the formula at least afforded Aull a decent living. 1

Aull did not claim that his reporting served a higher purpose. Scandal, divorce, suicide were simply "a newspaper's most valuable assets" because people wanted to read about misfortune. Beginning in the basement of the county courthouse, Aull found the raw materials ready to hand. From them he crafted homespun narratives that were more like the yarns of gifted gossips than the pyramidal compositions of professional journalists. . . .

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