During the 1850s, undercover journalists broke new ground by covering slave auctions, Northern uprisings, and fraud. In 1857, Mortimer Thomson, a comedic writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went undercover. For the series, “The Witches of New York,” he visited New York fortune tellers who advertised regularly in the newspapers. They sold tonics, offered to find stolen property, helped with matchmaking, and claimed they could tell the future. The series also took the reader to the seedier parts of Lower Manhattan to debunk tricksters and frauds. Later, his works were chronicled in a book, The Witches of New York. His work predates the turn of the twentieth century “stunt journalists” such as Nellie Bly, who wrote first-person narratives about their adventures to actively expose social injustice.

中文翻译：

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Mortimer Thomson 的“纽约女巫”：对算命交易的卧底报道

在 1850 年代，卧底记者开辟了新天地，报道奴隶拍卖、北方起义和欺诈。1857 年，霍勒斯·格里利 (Horace Greeley) 的《纽约论坛报》(New York Tribune) 的喜剧作家莫蒂默·汤姆森 (Mortimer Thomson) 卧底。在“纽约女巫”系列中，他拜访了纽约的算命先生，他们经常在报纸上做广告。他们出售滋补品，主动提出寻找赃物，帮助牵线搭桥，并声称他们可以预知未来。该系列还带读者前往曼哈顿下城较肮脏的地方，揭穿骗子和骗子。后来，他的作品被编入了《纽约女巫》一书中。他的作品早于 20 世纪之交的“特技记者”，例如 Nellie Bly，她以第一人称叙述他们的冒险经历，积极揭露社会不公。