Spawn of the Hoax: Sensation, True Crime and Movie Magazines

Pulp Today (Pulp Tragedies)

Spawn of the Hoax: Sensation, True Crime and Movie Magazines

Most of the genres pulp magazines came to ply are descended from what is classically known as Romance.  The word ‘Romance’ rather romantically once described any work of written fantasy that one could pleasurably escape into. As such, it is a departure from the core ancient divisions between tragedy and comedy.  Comedy is primarily an exercise in wit, whereas tragedy provides moral instruction. From the time of the ancients through Shakespeare there have been struggles as to where to place the lines of demarcation. (As anyone who has wondered what was so funny about some of the Bard’s comedies will tell you.) By the ancient measure, all of Romance would fall under the heading of comedy--as would all of the pulp genres, save one. The largest flavor of this sole pulp tragedy niche we call Gossip. Its mother genre is something I have dubbed Big Lie Newsfiction.

It is tragic. Thankfully most of it is made up. One might argue that the Pulp version of tragedy is the only one currently in modern operation. After all, no movies, no books, no television shows are marketed as tragedies today. This wasn’t the case in ancient times when the performance of tragedy actually had a slated season. To decant the word tragedy in its classic sense, it is a story with a moral—or a moral warning. The action of the plot involves someone doing something bad and reaping the consequences. That simple plot sailed a thousand plays way back when. Today it’s a big no sale. Put on a show designed to bum people out and you are going to be looking at empty seats. (*1) And this die out of tragedy is not just in movies and plays—it’s everywhere. My own dead reckoning is that tragedy died with the Film Noirs, but the form has rarely been popular since the twilight of the Romantic Era. Part of the problem is that even when it’s done well—or massively disguised, as in the case of the Film Noir—it comes off as preachy. Moral uplift in entertainment mediums has become a tough sell.

The Pulp version varies from true tragedy in that its intended audience reaction has little to do with revulsion (resulting in moral uplift via the process of demonstrating the need to avert from negative consequences), but rather what the Germans call  schadenfreude, or joy from the suffering of others. Let’s say that the Pulp version is a bit more democratic than that, meant to elicit a spectrum of reactions from ‘tsk-tsk’ to that feeling one has when passing a traffic accident. That it nets such broad reaction is what makes the Pulp version salable.

So what defines the Pulp version of tragedy? For the most part, it’s a bad story: a bloody spectacle with some nouns thrown in, long on description and short on cause and effect relationships. If it bleeds it truly does lead--and there’s not much emphasis on the mop up. Some of it is akin to the Horror genre. And some of it is simply disguised porn.

In some cases the only distinction between what is actually in the Horror genre of fiction and what is in the Big Lie Newsfiction genre are the words “A True Story”. The “A True Story” label can cover up a lot of plot sins. It’s also a license to be really, really gross. Horror fiction itself belongs firmly in the Comedy/Romance continuum, since it relies mostly on wit for its proper execution. The Pulp “A True Story” version is fairly much just a string of bad events, occasionally name dropping someone famous. Both Horror and “A True Story” allow for some motivational short cutting, presuming the existence of “EVIL” as a character with certain stock traits. (*2) Neither genre is particularly deep.

In short, Big Lie Newsfiction can be a poorly constructed Horror story sold as truth. I have started with this genre because it is the oldest genre in Pulp Fiction. It has two root origins which predate the other genres.

Originally magazines were nothing more than newspapers. Which is to say that they sprung from newspapers, not that newspapers are magazines. Nothing sells newspapers like bad news. Without bad news, your circulation is going to go up and down. (*3) In an effort to pick up circulation regardless of the news cycle, William Randolph Hearst invented features, such as the comics section and crossword puzzles. And he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. But before then (1895), your average newspaper publisher would have to wait out the lack of vulgarities in the news cycle.

Not all of them did. Which is really the start of our story. Indian massacres were once very popular. (Not with the participants, but with newspaper buyers.) Tactic one is to beat the Indian massacre to death. New details. Every day. For weeks, if you can. Tactic two is to invent an Indian massacre. Naturally, it can’t be too close. (If an Indian massacre is happening in your town,  no one is going to want to read about it.) Keep it west of Pennsylvania and no one will question it. And while you’re inventing that, make up some other stuff. Paraphrase every sin from the Bible and change the setting to just over the horizon.

The typical formula for such publications included coverage of incest, group sex, cult rituals, Indian massacres, murder, vice crime and the all time favorite White Slavery. By typical I mean that there were just dozens of these newspapers. When the National Police Gazette launched in 1845 it was printed on pink paper, just to distinguish itself from the other publications of its kind. All of this has sadly become lumped in with the term Yellow Journalism, which it is to a point. (*4) As with magazines today, even papers which largely covered the same topics tended to have a proprietary slant to their presentation. Some of the papers slanted towards reporting tales of the supernatural or unexplained. The more mainstream or serious seeming of them highlighted a presentation we today call True Crime. Or they added something else, such as a focus on hunting or particularly grizzly stories from the orient. The National Police Gazette itself added sports coverage and girlie photos.

Heady stuff. Add in celebrities and you fairly much have the modern tabloid. Historically none of our current tabloids has any connection to these papers of old. This is simply the form that this genre first found its expression. The divisions that we do eventually see is between supernatural sensation and True Crime. Most publications came to specialize in one or the other and few of these papers combined it with anything else. These early scandal rags became victims of their own success. In the big markets, “real” newspapers started aping their presentation. The ones that held on did so by being more vulgar than the newspapers wanted to be, but not quite so vulgar as to be considered pornographic. And some of them held on by being porn, either of the blood lust or flesh showing variety.

The second root of Big Lie Newsfiction is the Hoax. Hoaxes have been a popular form of entertainment forever, perhaps pre-dating language itself. The ancient variety isn’t necessarily harmless. (*5) By the time the American colonies came to be settled, the hoax had become something of a refined entertainment commodity.

Strike that. It was largely  vulgarities peddled by circuses. The “industry” consisted of two headed babies in jars and mutated stuffed calves and the public display of deformed people. Disgusting though this may be, it beats burning such people alive as devils or seeing their existence as something evil in and of itself. Being marketed as a curiosity is an advancement, bleak as it may seem.

By the 1850s, the circuses, like everything else, were being industrialized. The shows traveled better and each show competed on themes of increasing novelty. This is where we cue the taxidermists, who outdid each other with grafted creations of various forms  and half puppet half animal things. PT Barnum is the promoter  most remembered by history, but there were others. It’s up in the air how many people believed in these frauds and how many of them were drawn in just to appreciate the craftsmanship. Our pals in the sleazy pan-regional tabloid business were just glomming off the slipstream of public fascination for such things. Unlike a lot of popular delusions, the big hoax did start to fade in appeal.

It started to fade in all mediums except the type which later shovelwared their goods straight into pulp magazine form. The over the top claim and a willingness to play at the margins of public sensibilities were with the pulp magazines almost from their inception. Outside of pulp magazines, the big hoax stopped being that much of a draw. With the Civil War advent of the Dime Novel, a lot of the attraction the fantastic has was transferred to actual fiction. (Very long story made short.) It should also be said that the amazing amount of progress being made in sciences and industry at the time made various feats of taxidermy seem hardly worthy of attention.

A lot of the honed arts involved in big hoaxes transferred well to the medium of moving pictures. Although “movies” as we know them are a turn of the century innovation, the medium of moving pictures itself predates them by about two decades. There was an industry in penny arcade houses and traveling vendors presenting moving picture shows on different subjects. Fully doctored animations or arrays of photographs altered with airbrush were fairly common. Which is to say that a form of the hoax was with the movie industry the whole time. It was not, however,  until  a movie industry appeared that the hoax would find its next set of legs.

Like professional wrestling, what we today would call Movie Fandom was originally tried straight. Early magazines covering the movies were haughty damn affairs. The art form was treated extremely seriously, instantly granted a place beside the grand mediums of plays, music and painting. This elitist approach proved to be a disaster for the magazines and the movie industry. For reasons that truly cannot be explained, a who’s who of the new art form’s performers were stripping for the magazines. You read that right. Having run out of anything to say, the celluloid gods and goddesses became prone to flouncing around in the buff for the edification of the fan press. Several studio boss heart attacks and the establishment of a censorship office later, all of that  ended.

So the Movie Fan magazine itself became recast. What we now view as the classic form of the Movie Fan magazine was essentially the creation of publisher Captain Billy Fawcett. (*6) Captain Billy is only tangentially a publisher. He is mostly a full time pal of plutocrats, such as studio bosses. Following Captain Billy’s lead, Movie Fan magazines became house organs for the studios.

The intention of the Movie Fan magazine is to promote the studios’ investments.  The investments at the time included movies, theaters, technologies and performers under contract. (*7) Movie Fan magazines have as their alternating primary focus three functions: (1) Create interest in upcoming productions; (2) Create an interest in up and coming performers; and (3) Maintain the interest in performers who are not currently in showing productions. By alternating focus, I mean that there is some variance in editorial slant.

And there’s a lot of editorial slant going on. Like everything in Hollywood, the Movie Fan magazines were heavily scripted. The photos are posed. The stories are banged out by the publicity department. In general, the feed back loop that kept the process going was that the studios provided the magazines with ready to print material, free of charge, and the magazines provided the studios with free publicity and promotion. That’s the way things stayed for quite a while.

Except for Film Fun. I mention the magazine Film Fun not because it is an important Movie Fan magazine. Film Fun was not a classic Movie Fan magazine. Rather, it was a vestige of the first era of Movie Fan magazines, the kind that got cracked down on. Movie Fan magazines developed their own format, somewhat similar to the old Life magazine. Most Movie Fan magazines were bedsheet sized lithographic products. Their emphasis was on pictures and the larger than normal format aided this presentation. Film Fun, by contrast, was a standard sized magazine, which traded down on its paper stock and became a pulp magazine. Film Fun is important as a pulp magazine and we mention it because pulp fiction vehicles are our emphasis.

As one might imagine, the Movie Fan magazine business was something of a closed circuit. You had to be willing to play ball with the studios to just get in the door. Getting the image of a known person to appear on your product is also a nice advantage, more so if it’s free. And the magazines were fairly profitable. All of the major publishers were in it. And the minor houses that were in it did so as their primary business. Big or small, the publishers plying the trade had dues to pay and a line to tow. Poor Film Fun wound up marooned.

So Film Fun said “screw it”. Those two words fairly much sum up Film Fun. It don’t tow no Hollywood line. And thus it wound up with less and less movie oriented content. It was, however, one of the few objective voices covering the industry. When it felt like it. Film Fun never did hard news, but it did let someone other than the dictators of Hollywood have their say. Mostly Film Fun was sort of a hoax itself: a humor magazine with the title of a Movie Fan magazine. Oddly, it was successful enough in this format to have imitators. So on top of the three different slants of Movie Fan magazines, you also have a number of publications—mostly pornographic--in pulp form that have permutations of the word ‘Movie’ in the title, which have little or nothing to do with the film industry. (*8)

Film Fun and its kin carried a lot of humor fiction. There is a question as to whether or not the Movie Fan magazines themselves should be considered pulp fiction vehicles. Much of their content could be considered ‘advertorial’ in today’s terms. Spewing superlatives over what were largely clunker films may not quite qualify as fiction, but the off project promotion certainly does. The Movie Fan magazines were chock full of candid articles about stars and their off camera antics, most of which were crafted from whole cloth. If that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is. They invented relationships, hobbies and events all to match the idiom studios had chosen to promote each performer with.

We see some of the stock stories every now and then. Hunk from night time drama pays the grocery bill for the person in line ahead of him. Hunk saves cat from tree. Screen Queen brings fan out of coma with a visit to the hospital. There are a dozen of these gems which first saw the light of fictional day from the 1930s until the outbreak of WWII. Quite a few of the Movie Fan magazines continued peddling positive puff pieces until the Movie Fan magazine’s demise in the 1960s.

While our pals in the Movie Fan strata were pumping out the positive star spin, a small industry in airing celeb dirty laundry began to evolve in the legitimate newspapers. It was largely the work product of a few high profile columnists, all of whom were eventually undone by their own abuses of power. Weirdly, the heyday of these dishers of dirt coincided exactly with that of the entirely ‘up with star people’ Movie Fan magazines. These competing, contrary presentations were both equally popular right up to the moment America entered WWII.

The war constituted a black out for both presentations. It was four years of utter irrelevance, from which neither the Movie Fan magazines nor the gossip slingers would ever return from.  Thanks largely to the undoing of several bad apples, gossip columns lost their traction and newspaper syndication deals were dropped left and right. At about the same time, the movie studios dismantled the publicity machines which had fed the Movie Fan magazines. (*9) Both presentations were headed into the margins and converged. The Movie Fan magazines that survived came to feature the now faded gossip columnists. They never were as popular as they had been and the whole form seem destined for doom by the 1950s.

The Movie Fan magazine industry was at this point dominated by pulp houses. Pulp houses bought out the more established titles. At the same time publishers who had been in various types of Movie Fan magazines began expanding into pulps, mostly through launching True Confessions titles.

The Movie Fan magazines had expanded their spectrum to include a bit more darkness. In true pulp style, it was only a matter of time before hoaxes in their variety began to be added to the mix. One magazine founded a miniature boomlet in relentless movie star muck raking and bashing.

The name of the magazine was Confidential. It was launched in 1952 by a fetish porn pulp magnate and rather quickly grew to five million circulation. Confidential’s particular spin was that it didn’t just report gossip, it actually engaged in investigative journalism targeting celebrities. (*10) Like everything else that works, it spawned a fleet of imitators. The pulp publishers with Movie Fan magazines in their fold copied Confidential’s presentation. The pulp publishers who didn’t have Movie Fan titles simply launched knock offs of Confidential.

Coming into this mix a bit later were the tabloids. The National Enquirer, a weekly newspaper which had survived on the revival of True Crime and splatter porn, added Confidential’s presentation to its mix. Many other existing sensationalist tabloids then jumped into the frey, dragging their six headed kittens and alien sex massacres into the mix of name brand celebrity tragedy. The form had come full circle.

This brings us fairly much up to today. In this series we are taking a census of the state of pulp genres today. Although the pulps are gone—and the tabloids are on their last legs—most of the  Spawn of The Big Hoax is alive and well. To start where we left off, Gossip has never had more outlets nor seemingly more draw than it does today.

Much of it is still manufactured, with the exception of the occasional Tiger Woods being beaten senseless by his own wife with his own clubs. Like Indian massacres, those are rare. Mostly what we have is opt in publicity seeking. As opposed to a studio dictating the story or it being dredged up by investigators, we have the surrogates of celebrities in need of a buck planting the stories. Let us take the hypothetical example of Valerie Bertinelli. She’s certainly had a rough life. But One Day at a Time has been off the air for years, so the interest in her is fairly minimal. Before being hired by Weight Watchers the actress did a barnstorming tour of the gossip shows and tab weeklies, spilling her oversized guts about the woes of being the wife of a drug abusing, cancer-stricken rock star. Next thing we know, her fatness and brokeness problems are solved. This is no accident: it’s an example of the modern pattern.

I have absolutely no idea how many gossip TV programs there are out there now. Half of the mid-day talk shows are nothing more than gossip with a host. Every network has one. Every over the air station has one. There are entire cable networks which do nothing but celebrity this or that. It has become a form of show business in and of itself. In print it’s one of the few going genres. Not including the tabloids, there are seven national bi-weekly  publications on newsstands at all time. It’s downright vibrant as print forms go. The question for our purposes is if it remains a form of fiction.

Of course it is. If anything, the modern form has spread even further into fiction. There is today a very large niche in genre fiction supposedly written by celebrities. Snooki is a prominent romance writer. Not really, of course. She just puts her name on the stuff. And she is hardly alone in hawking fiction works. (*11)

True Crime is also abounding. It’s a mainstay of your cable television networks, often grafting itself to the television “reality TV” trend. You can now view a criminal’s escapades from inception, to bust, to how he spends his time in jail.  The essence of the pulp True Crime approach is to bring the enthusiasm usually reserved for sports reporting to other fields. The actual “True Crime” style of jazzing up some rather pedestrian criminal antics is so pervasive today that it hardly goes noticed.

Unfortunately much of the important criminal activity of today—rigging the stock market, ruining the banking system, fixing elections through unrestrained contributions and gerrymandering—are so complex that the amount of exposition needed to  convey context ruins any rhythm that a reporter can muster.

(That said, there are some excellent hacks out there covering the big events.)

What we don’t see too much today is fiction being done in True Crime style. Big Lie Newsfiction is a little harder to pull off today. The Google thing calls BS on too much. Other than rehashes of the celeb hunk gives CPR to stranger bit, tabloids have stopped simply inventing the news. Despite their histories of alien baby blackmail hoaxes, most of what you read today in the tabloids and the People Magazine clones is true. The only True Crime fiction practitioners today are propagandists, in the modern forms of think tanks or political magazines with circulations in the 10s of thousands.

To touch on some not so recent history, a think magazine by the name of American Spectator once  ran a series which supposedly exposed how Bill and Hillary Clinton were mass murderers. They then went on to expose AIDS as being a fraud disease. On the left we have a small industry in demonizing the Koch Brothers (who are perfectly dreadful in a hum drum way, but far short of satanic). And it goes on. This political press—partisan press, really—is the real last resting place for Big Lie Newsfiction. Oddly, it does fit a pattern in what we saw before with Roth’s slams of Herbert Hoover (see our posting I Was Hitler’s Doctor) and the eventual fate of the once brilliant American Mercury. (*12) Most of it, to put it bluntly, is entertainment for the choir. Little of it gains any traction in the real world.

Pulp vices have seasons and new technologies take the shop worn genres to places they have never been before. Fantasy Fiction has gained a whole new following thanks to the medium of computer gaming. Other genres it would seem should be cueing up for new treatment, but not everything lends itself to first person interaction. Using the 360 environment as an actual story telling medium has really yet to be explored.

Some genres may have been rendered technologically dead. This seems to be the case of the final spawn of the big hoax, the supernatural. Here I am including vampires, ghost sisghtings and evidence of UFO encounters. Photography at one point was supposed to be the proof of the spiritualist’s cause. Once upon a time the world was rife with astral projections and spirits captured on film. The moment the darkroom and the film disappeared, the spirits went with them.  UFO Encounters in off the beaten track places were also once widely reported fare. Today our world is fast becoming a Big Brother parody. The average person is photographed one hundred times in a given day. Casual albeit unconnected constant surveillance is now part of our normal existence. With so many more monitors and cameras in place, one would think that the number of captured UFO and ghost sightings would explode exponentially. Were there a gram of truth in any of it, we would have  casually cataloged its vast parade to the degree that the existence of such phenomena is proven beyond a doubt. But that simply has not happened. The whole field has dropped off the face of the earth. As opposed to belief in unseen ghosts and aliens from other worlds, we instead have notions such as global warming being treated widespread as fact. Bugbears thrive only to the degree that they can remain unseen.

(Yes, I pulped up the ending. Spare me your comments on global warming. I am all for clean air and clean water and letting wildlife have its space. I’m just not a big fan of pivot tables as a vehicle for fiction. )

(*1)  Certain evangelical Christian groups have been attempting to revive tragedy by staging short moral plays. This is an offshoot of the ‘skits’ incorporated into many religious worship presentations. Outside of church, some groups have been attempting to co-opt the “Satanic” lure of Halloween Spook Houses by staging Sin Plays in a similar setting. Most of the sin plays are scenes depicting the consequences of various moral infractions. The customers move from one sin consequence to the next, like in a spook house. In their way, they are one act tragedies. This constitutes the only revival in the classical tragedy form.

(*2) Both the “A True Story” and much of modern Horror have a tendency to be more spectacle than plot. Rhyme or reason seems to be beyond the scope of either genre. Part of this may be because of the audience expectation for the material. People came here for bloodletting, not a short course on psychobabble.      

(*3) Not quite as true as one might believe. Even without the later advents of “features” the stock elements of a newspaper drew audiences on a fairly consistent basis. Back when newspapers were the only real medium of note, they enjoyed predictable patterns of circulation. And like the cycles of plays in ancient times, various editions of newspapers had themes. Morning was for the weather, the big picture news stories and highlights of strictly local events. Evening was for the stock tables. Night covered the sports scores. And there were themed days, also. Thursday was the big coupon day. There was a lot to come back for on a daily basis and it wasn’t uncommon for people to buy both a morning and an evening paper. Newspapers only became circulation sensitive to the positive after the rise of radio. Weather and holidays had more of a negative impact on circulation than lulls in the news cycle. So if our publisher has decided to resort to lying to spike his circulation, he probably is trying to overcome some other shortage of resources.

(*4) There’s a distinction between playing up a sensational event or making up an event and what actually was Yellow Journalism. The point behind Yellow Journalism may have been to sell newspapers, but it also highlighted a genocide happening a mere 90 miles off America’s shores. The Spanish were holding Cubans in concentration camps and were murdering them by the score. That was the ‘cause’ behind the Spanish-American War. The Yellow Journalist may have given pride of place to certain incidents—and may not have had the most pure of motives—but the underlying story they were out to raise awareness of was too horribly true. That said, the genres of True Crime and Sensationalism in the Big Lie Newsfiction sense are usually just works of imagination done in journalistic style, having no underlying agenda. Both True Crime and Sensation pre date Yellow Journalism by many decades.

(*5) One of the better catalogs of such can be found in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. First published in 1841, the book itself is somewhat responsible for creating an awareness in publisher circles of the public’s appetite for the fantastic. The book has never gone out of print. An alienist’s text book at heart, it covered a range of historical spates of odd group behavior. A niche for material similar to this has existed ever since. The last prominent peddler of the odd was Robert Ripley, whose books, comic strips and museums are still with us.  

(*6) Captain Billy certainly dominated the field. Actually a number of publishers made the claim to have started the first one.  The entirely bombastic, boosterish, fawning style Fawcett used may not have been his invention, either. Kissing up to Hollywood pretty people and their overlords just comes naturally to some folks.

(*7) Operating the local theaters turned out to be the most profitable portion of their investment portfolio. Unfortunately, that was the one portion that the studios had to divest themselves of after WWII. (As part of a far-reaching anti-trust action.) With the great unknown of television on the horizon, the revenues of the theaters gone and being mired in the post WWII recession, the movie studios utterly dismantled the contracted actor “Star System” and with it much of their publicity machinery. That cut off the free material the Movie Fan magazines had been making its bones hawking. And that effectively killed the Movie Fan format.

(*8) Unlike “As Seen On TV”, no one controls the use of the word “Movie” or even “Hollywood”. Like “Christmas” it can be sprinkled on a wide variety of items. Our pals in the pulps (and their brothers in the comics) plastered the word “Movie” on anthologies in every genre, with recycled Romance fiction being the most common. Sometimes it was plastered on anthologies which otherwise had no theme. Early on, it came to denote what the ‘X-Rated’ term means today.

(*9) See note 7. The lack of ready made material didn’t kill the Movie Fan magazines outright. But it did make them harder to produce. Although the studios were always willing to shovel press kits at anyone who wants one, they no longer had a vested interest in their “stars”. Performers with particularly good publicists tried gamely to fill the void. In the end, they could not keep up. Also, there was a certain sameness to this material which may have at this point worn out its welcome. Times change.

(*10) Early on, Confidential was just a venue for gossip columnist Walter Winchell to launch yet another come back. As was the practice amongst some pornographers in the pulp business, Confidential was essentially the same magazine as Whisper with the girlie pictures taken out. This sort of recycling went on all the time. Standard newsstand pulps and skin magazines had entirely different distribution systems and, it was felt, different audiences. Confidential’s real purpose was to recycle the tamer material from Whisper. Although the publisher told a different story, I think the success of Confidential had caught him flat footed. By the time he realized that Confidential was such a big hit, Winchell had already departed the fold. This necessitated the publisher starting  a ‘detective agency’ which rooted out star gossip.  As opposed to actual trained detectives, this agency was headed by the publisher’s own daughter. They invented what is called “Check Book Journalism” or the practice of paying for leads from sources. Confidential found it more effective to pay snitches than Winchell.

(*11) Get your kisser on television and you will have a book contract handed to you, no questions asked. It doesn’t have to be fiction. You can write history or doodle, if you want to. And seemingly people will buy this. People will also buy new works from writers who have been dead for decades. It’s the single hottest trend in publishing.

(*12) The long form Political Smear is a genre of fiction older than the English language. And it’s been part of the political process since the founding of our country. The partisan press isn’t swiping this form—they invented it. The pulp version is simply doing it to make a buck. The normal political version is spewing lies in hopes that some of them stick. That our last president was “learning disabled” and that our current president is “similar in body language to Hitler” are recent examples.

A Final Note: The modern versions of these forms are efforts to jazz up the truth. In their original forms resort to such genres was the sign of a publisher with poor resources. He’s making things up because he can’t compete. He doesn’t have the money for reporters or features or wire service copy.

Next: What Happened to Genres in General? As opposed to genres, the typical broad divisions today are Drama, Comedy, Romantic and Action. None of these common labels really address their place in the classic spectrum, however. Most are defined by what elements they lack. Has the modern appetite for fiction closed?