Dana’s attitude toward the other big newspapers was more kindly:
The Times is a very respectable paper, and more than that, a journal of which the Republican party has reason to be proud. It is not a servile organ, but a loyal partisan. We prefer for our own part to keep aloof from the party politicians. They are disagreeable fellows to have hanging about a newspaper office, and their advice we do not regard as valuable. But we do not decry party newspapers. They have their field, and must always exist. The Times is a creditable example of such a newspaper. It would be better, however, if Mr. Jennings himself wrote the whole editorial page.
The mistake of the Times was in lapsing into the dulness of respectable conservatism after its Ring fight. It should have kept on and made a crusade against frauds of all sorts.
The Herald has improved since young Mr. Bennett’s return. We are attracted toward this son of his father. He has a passion for manly sports, and that we like. If the shabby writers who make jest of his walking-matches had an income of three or four hundred thousand dollars a year, perhaps they would drive in carriages instead of walking and dawdle away their time on beds of ease or the gorgeous sofas of the Lotos Club. Mr. Bennett does otherwise. He strides up Broadway with the step of an athlete, dons his navy blue and commands his yacht, shoots pigeons, and prefers the open air of Newport to the confinement of the Herald office.
The World is a journal which pleases us on many accounts ... but occasionally there is a bit of prurient wit in its columns that might better be omitted. The World is also too often written in too fantastic language. Its young men seem to vie with each other in tormenting the language. They will do better when they learn that there is more force in simple Anglo-Saxon than in all the words they can manufacture. We advise them to read the Bible and Common Prayer Book. Those books will do their souls good, anyway, and they may also learn to write less affectedly.
The Sun was as frank in discussing its own theories and ambitions as it was in criticising its contemporaries for dulness and poor writing. Dana’s dream, never to be realized, was a newspaper without advertisements. He believed that by getting all the news, condensing it into the smallest readable space, and adding such literary matter as the readers’ tastes demanded, a four-page paper might be produced with a reasonable profit from the sales, after paper and ink, men and machinery, had been paid for.
An editorial article in the Sun on March 13, 1875, was practically a prospectus of this idea:
Until Robert Bonner sagaciously foresaw a handsome profit to be realized by excluding advertisements and crowding a small sheet with such choice literature as would surely attract a mighty throng of readers, never did the owner of any serial publication so much as dream of making both ends meet without a revenue from advertisements. The Tribune, the Times, and the Herald at length ceased to expect a profit from their circulation, and then they came to care for large editions only so far as they served to attract advertisers.
It was then that the Sun conceived the idea of a daily newspaper that should yield more satisfactory dividends from large circulation than had ever been declared by the journals that had looked to the organism of political parties and to enterprising advertisers for the bulk of their income. It saw in New York a city of sufficient population to warrant the experiment of a two-cent newspaper whose cost should equal that of the four-cent dailies in every respect, the cost of white paper alone excepted. Accordingly we produced the Sun on a sheet that leaves a small margin for profit, and by restricting the space allotted to advertisers and eliminating the verbiage in which the eight-page dailies hide the news, we made room in the Sun for not only all the real news of the day, but for interesting literature and current political discussion as well.
It was an enterprise that the public encouraged with avidity. The edition rapidly rose to one hundred and twenty thousand copies daily, and it is now rising; while the small margin of profit on that enormous circulation makes the Sun able to exist without paying any special attention to advertising—approaching very closely, in fact, to the condition of a daily newspaper able to support itself on the profits of its circulation alone.