National Police Gazette
According to the Joyce Sports Research Collection of the University of Notre Dame:
"In its heyday under publisher/editor Richard Kyle Fox in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Gazette was America's leading illustrated journal of the lurid and sensational, focusing on crime, sex, the theater - and sports, especially boxing. Fox came to realize the potential of boxing for increasing circulation through his coverage of the Paddy Ryan-Joe Goss fight of 30 May 1880. He soon became the ring's foremost promoter, defining weight classifications, offering championship belts, and contributing greatly to boxing's new legitimacy. The Gazette is of decreasing interest after 1900, as sales declined and its journalistic techniques and subject matter were selectively appropriated by the New York dailies."
The Police Gazette began publishing in 1846, with an emphasis on criminals. When the United States began war with Mexico, the War Department, plagued with desertions, subsidized the Gazette, and the paper published detailed descriptions of those who had gone AWOL on its back page each week. For thirty years after the war, the paper grew dull. In time it got into deep debt, and a father-son engravers took over ownership.
Meanwhile, Richard Fox had come to America from Belfast in 1874. In time he got a job as an advertising salesman for the Commercial Bulletin--deemed the Wall Street Journal of its day. Fox also sold ads for the crumbling Police Gazette. The engraver owners sold their interest in the publication to Fox as a settlement of debts they owed him. It is claimed that Fox then invented the sports page, the gossip column, and the concept of the illustrated paper. (He used woodcuts, not photographs, for his illustrations.) He made prizefighters popular public figures. He began awarding a Police Gazette championship belt.
Fox died a millionaire in 1922, the same year that The Ring magazine became "The Bible of Boxing." He had operated The Gazette for 20 years. Ten years later the publication went bankrupt, and it was taken over by Harold Roswell, who made it a monthly paper. Then a Canadian outfit purchased it, and it limped on for some time before disappearing altogether.
Some of the above information is courtesy of Tom Wolfe's introduction to The Police Gazette, edited by Gene Smith & Jayne Barry Smith (1972).
- It claimed a weekly circulation of 150,000: see here
- More Information
- Cover Samples #1,#2,#3
- See also Terry McGovern's Police Gazette Title Belt
