HARD-FIGHTING EDITOR.
Founder of Modern Journalism Was
Called Everything That Had an Unpleasant
Name, but He Prospered.
James Gordon Bennett, who founded the New York Herald, was well over thirty-five years of age when he left the office of the old New York Courier and Enquirer. He had learned what a newspaper should be, he believed, and he was going to put that knowledge into operation. He had toiled early and late all his life, and when he was ready to start for himself he had a nominal capital of five hundred dollars, and a big idea.
He was the only newspaper man in New York who thought that a newspaper didn't have to be dull to be good. In fact, he found that if he wished to be an editor at all it would have to be on his own paper. So on May 6, 1835, in a cellar on Wall Street, he issued the first number of the Herald.
Many things which we take for granted in the newspapers of to-day were originated by Bennett and his lively little cellar-born sheet. In the second month of its existence, the Herald printed the first Wall Street reports that had ever appeared in an American daily. Later, in the same year, Bennett introduced modern reportorial methods by his graphic "story" of the great fire that devastated down-town New York in December, 1835; and his introduction of a picture of the Stock Exchange on fire, and a map of the burned district, was another epoch-making innovation. It was he, too, who ordered for the Herald a telegraphic report of the first speech ever sent in full over the wires to a newspaper—that of Calhoun on the Mexican War.
There were no theories concerning the news in the Herald, no stately, long-winded, word-spinning explanations of what the news meant; just the news itself, given tersely and in as simple and bright language as possible. The readers were left to draw their own inferences and make their own comments.