Others among the eleven dailies were the Commercial Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser, and the Star, the last-named being the Post’s closest rival in evening circulation. Much attention was attracted to the Daily Advertiser in 1835 by the Washington letters of Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded the Express, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy obstacles. Compared with London, the New York field was overcrowded, and no journal had many subscribers; the Courier was vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them into vice. Advertising rates continued ridiculously small. The Evening Post and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of $40, with a subscription thrown in, for indefinite space; the first insertion of a “square,” 8 to 16 lines, cost seventy-five cents, the second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the Courier (apart from yearly insertions) reached $55, that sum was thought remarkable.
The harbinger of the new journalism was Benjamin H. Day, a former compositor for the Evening Post, who in September, 1833, began issuing the first penny newspaper with sufficient strength to survive, the Sun. The idea of this innovation came from London, which had possessed its Illustrated Penny Magazine since 1830, sold in huge quantities in New York and other American cities; Bryant had often praised it as an instrument for educating the poor. The Sun began with a circulation of 300, which it rapidly increased, until after the publication of the famous “moon hoax” in 1835 it boasted the largest circulation in the world; three years later it distributed 38,000 copies daily. Not until the Civil War did it raise its price above one cent, and it continued to be read by the poor almost exclusively. It was not a political force, for it voiced no energetic editorial opinions, nor was it a better purveyor of intelligence than its neighbors. It showed no more enterprise in news-collecting, its correspondence was inferior, and its appeal, apart from its cheapness and special features, lay in its great volume of help-wanted advertisements.
The new journalism therefore had its real beginning when, on May 6, 1835, in a cellar in Wall Street—not a basement, but a cellar—Bennett established the Herald. He had fifteen years’ experience, five hundred dollars, two chairs, and a dry-goods box. It also was a penny paper. But its distinction rested upon the fact that it embodied four original ideas in journalism. The first, and most important, was the necessity of a thorough search for all the news. The second was that fixed principles are dangerous, and that it is most profitable to be on the winning side. Bennett felt with Hosea Biglow that
A merciful Providence fashioned us hollow
In order thet we might our princerples swallow.
The third was the value of editorial audacity—that is, of impudence, mockery, and Mephistophelian persiflage—for Bennett had seen in Boston that the saucy, indecorous Galaxy had been universally abused, and universally read. The fourth idea embodied in the Herald was the value of audacity in the news; of unconventionality, vulgarity, and sensationalism.
Above all, Bennett gave New York city the news, with a comprehensiveness, promptness, and accuracy till then undreamed of. At first, compelled by poverty to do all the work himself, and unable to hire his first reporter for more than three months, he found the task hard. But within five weeks (June 13) he began publishing a daily financial article, something that Bryant, Col. Stone, Webb, and Hallock had not thought of, although thousands were just as keenly interested in the exchange then as now. From one to four every business afternoon, having labored in his cellar since five in the morning, Bennett was making the rounds of the business offices, collecting stock-tables and gossip. Local intelligence began to be thoroughly gathered. Incomparably the best reports of the great fire of December, 1835, are to be found in the Herald. He was the first editor to open a bureau of foreign correspondence in Europe, something that Bryant might well have done. He soon went the Courier and Journal of Commerce one better by keeping his clipper off Montauk Point, and running a special train the length of Long Island with the European newspapers. A Herald reporter, notebook in hand, began to be seen in precincts which had never known a journalist. In 1839 Bennett made bold to report the proceedings of church sects at their annual meetings, and though the denominational officers were at first indignant, they became mollified when they saw their names in print. Important trials were for the first time followed in detail, and important public speeches reproduced in their entirety. The interview was invented.
This “picture of the world” was served up with a sauce. Bennett had no reverence and no taste. He announced his own forthcoming marriage in 1840 in appalling headlines: “To the Readers of the Herald—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—New Movement in Civilization.” The Herald was not a year old before it was ridiculing republican institutions, and in shocking terms assailing the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. When the Erie Railroad began its infamous early career, Bryant attacked the schemes of the speculators with great effect, and helped stop the first effort of the promoters to sack the State treasury. The Herald’s comment was brief and characteristic: “The New York and Erie Railroad is to break ground in a few days. We hope they will break nothing else.” James Parton quotes one of Bennett’s impudent paragraphs as representative. “Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything toward saving his own soul.” In even the few and brief book-notices this tone was maintained. Reviewing an Annual Register which told him that there were 1,492 rogues in the State Prison, Bennett added: “And God only knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”
By the prominence it gave to crimes of violence, divorces, and seduction, and by its bold personal gossip, the Herald fully earned the name of a “sensation journal.” Most of the other newspapers, the magazines, and the Catholic and Protestant pulpits, denounced it roundly. The Evening Post did not mention it by name, but in 1839 condemned “the nauseous practice which some of our journals have imitated from the London press of adopting a light and profligate tone in the daily reports of instances of crime, depravity, and intemperance which fall under the eye of our municipal police, making them the subject of elaborate witticisms, and spicing them with gross allusions.” The Herald’s cynical contempt for consistent principles increased the dislike with which it was viewed. In general it was Hunker Democratic, and built up a large Southern following, but it supported Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848. The English traveler, Edward Dicey, said that it had but two standing rules, one to support the existing Administration, the other to attack the land of Bennett’s birth. Dicey found that as late as Civil War times Bennett was barred from society, and that when he went to stay at a watering place near New York, the other guests at the hotel told the landlord that he must choose between the editor’s patronage and their own—and Bennett left.
But upon Bennett’s success was largely founded that of other great morning newspapers of the next decades. “It would be worth my while, sir, to give a million dollars,” said Henry J. Raymond, “if the devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the people of New York would like to read about next morning.” The Sun was given new life when it passed into the hands of Moses Y. Beach in 1838. Greeley, with a capital of $1,000, founded the Tribune in April, 1841, to meet the need for a penny paper of Whig allegiance. The sixpenny journals, the Evening Post, Commercial Advertiser, Courier, Journal of Commerce, and Express, perforce learned much from the Herald about news-gathering. Years later the Evening Post described the new spirit of enterprise which had seized upon journalism by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times of great excitement the Herald and Tribune raced locomotive engines against each other in order to get the earliest news; on one occasion, we remember, the sharp reporter engaged for the Tribune “appropriating” an engine which was waiting, under steam, for the use of the opposition agent, and so beating the Herald at its own game.... Nor was the competition confined to enterprises like these. For want of the boundless facilities now afforded by the organized enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were curious experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on board of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery in Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax or Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under their wings, and delivered their charge to their trainer in his room near Wall Street; an adventurous person, known at the time by the mysterious title of “the man in the glazed cap,” made a voyage across the Atlantic in a common pilot boat twenty years ago, secretly and with only three or four companions, in the interest of two or three journals which determined to “beat” the others in their arrangements for obtaining early news from abroad.