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.
Competitors Tried to Crush Him.
Bennett was right in trusting to the readers' intelligence, for his following increased. But though the public came to him in goodly numbers, the battle was a desperate, up-hill one. Five years after he started, all the papers in the city banded together to crush him. The records of the fight are curious now, chiefly for the profusion of the epithets that were hurled at him. One paper, in one short broadside, managed to call him an "obscene rogue," "profligate adventurer," "venomous reptile," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "habitual liar," and "veteran blackguard."
Bennett weathered the storm, seldom bothering about hitting back, but all the time striving to make his paper brighter and more readable. His adversaries soon realized that they were losing ground, and they gradually relinquished the struggle.
Twelve years after he had started the Herald, Bennett got into a dispute with Horace Greeley concerning the relative circulation of the Herald and Tribune. The dispute was settled by an impartial committee, and this committee found that the Herald had a daily circulation of 16,711 to the Tribune's 11,455, while the Weekly Herald had a circulation of 11,455 to a circulation of 15,780 for the Weekly Tribune. On the whole, the result was a decided victory for Bennett.