Arthur Brisbane

Arthur Brisbane (December 12, 1864 – December 25, 1936) was one of the best-known American newspaper editors of the 20th century, as well as a real estate investor.

Biography

Brisbane was born in Buffalo, New York, to Albert Brisbane (1809–1890), an American utopian socialist who is remembered as the chief popularizer of the theories of Charles Fourier in the United States. Albert was the author of several books, including Social Destiny of Man (1840), as well as the Fourierist periodical The Phalanx. He also founded the Fourierist Society in New York in 1839, and backed several other phalanx communes in the 1840s and 1850s.

Arthur was educated in the United States and Europe.

Career

In 1882, he began work as a newspaper reporter and editor in New York City, first at the Sun and later at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hired away from Pulitzer by William Randolph Hearst, he became editor of the New York Journal and Hearst's close friend. His syndicated editorial column had an estimated daily readership of over 20 million, according to Time magazine.

In 1897, he accepted the editorship of the Evening Journal, flagship of the Hearst chain, and through it gained influence unmatched by any editor in the United States. His direct and forceful style influenced the form of American editorial and news writing. The saying, "If you don't hit the reader between the eyes in your first sentence of your news column, there's no need to write any more," is attributed to him.

Hearst biographer W. A. Swanberg described Brisbane as "a one-time socialist who had drifted pleasantly into the profit system... in some respects a vest-pocket Hearst – a personal enigma, a workhorse, a madman for circulation, a liberal who had grown conservative, an investor."