During her professional career, Elizabeth Cochrane made a name for herself as a reporter writing under the pen name Nellie Bly. Her work would open up the whole new world of investigative reporting.
Cochrane started her career as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She got the job after she wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch to refute claims made in a column entitled “What Girls Are Good For.” The editor enjoyed her passion when she fervently opposed the sentiments that women were to be kept in the house and out of the workforce.
Cochrane always had a passion for exposing the truth. At the Dispatch as Nellie Bly, she wrote about working women and the grueling conditions at factories. But when factory owners complained to the newspaper, she was reassigned to cover topics like women’s fashion and gardening. But she wanted more, so the paper sent Bly to Mexico as a foreign correspondent. After six months, she had to flee the country after criticizing the government for jailing a journalist.
Pulitzer’s Offer
As Bly left the New York World’s office of prominent editor Joseph Pulitzer, she realized she was given the opportunity of a lifetime. Pulitzer offered her a special assignment: The newspaper wanted a report on what was taking place inside the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now called Roosevelt Island, which lies on New York City’s East River with Manhattan on the west and Queens to the east).
Bly knew it would not be easy to get into the asylum as a reporter, so she got creative. She checked herself into a women’s boarding house. She stayed up all night to make herself appear like a crazy person. She would accuse others in the boarding house of being insane. This frightened the other residents, and the police were called. After being assessed by a judge and a doctor, Bly was sent to Blackwell’s Island.
There, Bly experienced firsthand the horrible living conditions at the asylum. After 10 days, the newspaper demanded that she be released, and she was allowed to leave. Bly’s report was published in the New York World on Oct. 9, 1887. It was later released in a book entitled, “Ten Days in a Mad-House.”
This column would not only make Nellie Bly famous, but it would become known as the first investigative report. Her exposé prompted a grand jury investigation into the asylum. Improvements to the patient care system came shortly after.
In 1888, she convinced her editor to attempt a trip across the entire globe, similar to the story that had been told in the Jules Verne novel, “Around the World in Eighty Days.” The New York World highly publicized her voyage with a free trip to Europe to anyone who could guess the arrival time of each destination. Bly finished her excursion in 72 days; this broke a world record at the time and made her even more famous.
In 1895, Cochrane married, left journalism and dropped her pseudonym, and later became the head of her husband’s Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. There, she received patents for her inventions of a novel milk can and a stackable garbage receptacle.
She returned to journalism later in her life. She worked for the New York Evening Journal, and covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913, and then World War I.
The day after she died of pneumonia in 1922, the New York Evening Journal’s editor wrote a column calling her “the best reporter in America.”
