Walter Winchell

Walter Winchell, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in the East Side of Harlem with his parents until their eventual divorce. He taught himself how to dance and formed a dance act with two other boys called, "Little Men With Big Voices."He dropped out of school at the age of 13 in pursuit of bigger and better things.
 He got his introduction to journalism in 1917 when he was performing with a woman named Rita Greene in Chicago. A blizzard hit the city and he volunteered to help a friend, who was a reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner, cover the blizzard. When he returned to New York later on he began writing for the Vaudeville News, despite a warning from its editor that newspapermen are the poorest paid professional people in the world. He spent a couple years there before he was hired by the New York Evening Graphic, a tabloid comprised mostly of human-interest stories, in 1924. His column that he wrote for this successful tabloid, "Your Broadway and Mine," attracted the attention of the top performers, politicians, and gangsters of New York during that era. During this time "he broke the taboo against writing about marriages, babies, divorces, and other secrets."(Ritchie). Essentially, Winchell was the inventor of the modern gossip column.
In 1929, he was lured away from the Graphic to another tabloid, the New York Mirror, by William Randolph Hearst. Through his many connections, Hearst got Winchell's column published in over 2,000 newspapers across the country. However, because of the nature of his writing, he was often in trouble with celebrities as well as the law. He was never careful of his facts and was once sued for libel, and lost.
He transitioned from newspaper to radio in 1930 when he debuted on CBS's Saks on Broadway, a 15-minute show devoted to business news. However, despite his later involvement in another radio show, "The Jergens Journal, a 15-minute show that mixed entertainment news with matters of national importance"(Walter), he still wrote columns for the Mirror. During World War II he was known for attacking the Nazi's and Adolf Hitler in his columns. After the war, Winchell turned reactionary, and associated himself with anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy. This put Winchell out of favor with the public and contributed to his downfall. Also contributing to this was the advent of television, which overshadowed radio, and because his looks were not "TV quality," he began to lose his audience. In the end though, Walter Winchell went down as one of the most influential and successful gossip journalists and radio hosts of all time, even being inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2004.

Works Cited:
Ritchie, Donald A. American Journalists: Getting the Story. Oxford University Press. New York. 1997

Walter Winchell. Radio Hall of Fame Home Page. Accessed on 21 October 2013.
www.radiohof.org/news/walterwinchell.html