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It was inspired by the American expression yellow press (“yellow journalism”), which emerged at the end of the 19th century from the competition between the newspapers New York World and The New York Journal. They had gone to war to have in their pages the adventures of the Yellow Kid, the first comic strip in history.
The dispute behind the scenes was so heavy that the yellow of the coveted character ended up becoming synonymous with unscrupulous publications. In Portuguese, the expression had its color changed in Brazil in 1959, when the editorial office of the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Diário da Noite received information that a magazine called Escândalo extorted money from people photographed in compromising situations.
Journalist Alberto Dines, now editor of the TV show Observatório da Imprensa, prepared, for the next day’s headline, something like “Yellow press leads filmmaker to suicide”. Diário’s chief reporter, Calazans Fernandes, thought yellow was too bland for the tragic nature of the news and suggested changing it to brown. “Thus, the expression ‘brown press’ originated in a complaint against the brown press itself”, says Dines. In addition to creating the new term, the Diário da Noite headline contributed to the end of the criminal magazine Escândalo, which was closed shortly thereafter.