Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, 8th edition

Youth culture

A B C D E F G H I

JK

L M N O P R S T U V

XYZ

W

purchased Journal. The gap-toothed Kid in

his yellow smock, whose grin was recognized

throughout the city on billboards and sandwich

boards, joined the Journal as cartoon and

promotional image. Soon Hearst was organizing

the Yellow Fellow Transcontinental Bicycle Relay

followed by a bike carnival in New York’s Central

Park.

In response, Pulitzer hired Richard Buks

to continue the original cartoon strip, and in

1895 two Yellow Kids were in competition.

‘For contemporaries,’ writes Andrew Wernick

in Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology

and Symbolic Expression (Sage, 1991), ‘the Kid’s

colour became emblematic of the effects of

intensifi ed consumerization on the whole char-

acter of the popular press’.

Visual appeal had become central to the

process of promotion. When Hearst followed

Pulitzer in issuing a full-colour Sunday supple-

ment, the Journal announced its own ‘eight

pages of irridescent polychromous effulgence

that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe’. It is

perhaps more than a coincidence that the most

popular TV comic strip, Th e Simpsons, contin-

ued with the effulgence of yellow. See topic

guide under media history.

Youth culture Since the Second World War

(1939–45), considerable attention has been paid

to the cultures and sub-cultures of young people

• to their symbols, signs, philosophies, mores,
  norms, language, and music. Music is an essen-
  tial part of all youth cultures and sub-cultures, a
  mode of self-identifi cation (see self-identity),

multimedia journalism will have to accept that
traditional ways to structure the news text ‘are
now only a subset of all the important variables
to be considered when producing multimedia
news’.
At the macro-level of the website and the
micro-level of the news story, the operation of
the components of the PICK model will ‘be para-
mount if the audience member is to be retained’.
Yaros puts the case that ‘concepts in the PICK
model will be the determining factors that sepa-
rate mediocre content with content that will be
truly worth the time for the audience to engage’.
Yellow journalism Phrase used in the US to
describe newspapers involved in the internecine
(dog-eat-dog) warfare of the popular metropoli-
tan press empires of the late nineteenth century;
a battle which has continued to the present day
with mass-circulation tabloids competing for
readership with all sorts of exploitative off ers,
lurid revelations and blockbuster bingo.
Yellow Kid Newspaper cartoon character, the
possession of whose widely popular image – and
the use of that image – was fought over by New
York’s press barons, Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911)
and William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951). Th e
pictorial image was fast dominating the pages
of newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth
century, proving a circulation-booster and a
marketing device. Pulitzer’s New York World fi rst
featured Richard B. Outcault’s cartoon, Shanty-
town (renamed Hogan’s Alley). Hearst ‘raided’
the World’s Sunday edition, buying-in the entire
production team of the paper for his own, newly

Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, 2009

INVOLVEMENT

(interest and

interactivity)

CONTIGUITY

(of text, graphics,

animation)

PERSONALIZATION

(preferred content)

“KICK-OUTS”