Yellow journalism

This term, descriptive of sensational newspaper treatment of stories of crime, corruption and the like, goes back to before 1900. The first comic strip to run successfully in an American paper was the “Yellow Kid” in the New York World, beginning in 1895. To attract attention to the feature, yellow ink was used, and the World, which was pretty sensational in those years, became known as the “yellow paper’ – an epithet later extended in the term yellow journalism to any sensation-mongering newspaper.