The following year, Wilkes and a friend started publishing the National Police Gazette, a newspaper on crime reporting and other sensationalistic topics.

Wilkes also wrote a couple of books on non-sporting topics, and introduced pari-mutuel betting to the United States.

[1] Wilkes left the legal profession for journalism, first working for a series of short-lived newspapers in New York City, the Flash, the Whip, and the Subterranean.

[1] At the Subterranean, he came into contact with Mike Walsh, a politician and working class advocate who shared Wilkes' Democratic Party politics.

The scholar Donna Dennis says of Wilkes at this time that he was "a clever writer, with a tempera- ment that was at once ambitious, adventurous, and entrepreneurial".

[2] In August 1841, Wilkes joined forces with William Snelling and founded the Sunday Flash,[3] where he wrote and edited under a pseudonym, "Startle".

This time Wilkes, on the advice of his attorney, pled guilty in return for a suspended sentence and a promise to stop working for the sensationalist press.

[11] Collier's called the Gazette a record of "horrid murders, outrageous robberies, bold forgeries, astounding burglaries, hideous rapes, vulgar seductions, and recent exploits of pickpockets and hotel thieves.

Each issue ran a front page story detailing the life of some criminal, as part of a series titled "Lives of the Felons".

[13] Because of Wilkes' and Camp's efforts to combat crime in New York through the Gazette, the offices of the newspaper were the subject of attacks by mobs stirred up by criminals.

[5] It combined the facts of the case with elements from contemporary murder mysteries and seduction novels set in the growing cities of the time.

[19] At some point, Wilkes and Camp sold the Gazette to George W. Matsell, who had previously been Chief of Police for New York City.

Wilkes had been a member of the National Reform Association which sought to provide land for the urban poor as a way of improving their conditions.

[21] When Wilkes returned New York City, he began to work for William T. Porter's newspaper Spirit of the Times.

[1] Under Wilkes' ownership, the Spirit, which previously had covered mainly sporting events, expanded its coverage to include political matters.

Wilkes also claimed that the general did not usually arrive at the battlefield until after the fighting was concluded, a behavior that conflicted with McClellan's jingoistic dispatches.

The writer of his Dictionary of American Biography entry described him as a "master of a vigorous style that exactly suited his hard truculent disposition".

[1] Patricia Cohen, author of a history of Helen Jewett's life and murder, described Wilkes' as having an "articulate wit and a talent for sarcastic social criticism".