Each year the Camden Conference chooses a topic and my colleague Mac Deford and I put together a presentation of some of the history behind that topic. This year the Conference topic is “the media,” and so we’ve chosen to offer a history of the news from earliest times up into the 20th century.
As we went about our research we were both struck by the sea change in the newspaper business that was brought about by the founding in 1833 of Benjamin Day’s New York Sun. You’re probably familiar with some of the other publishers of that era, Horace Greeley and William Lloyd Garrison for example, but who ever heard of Benjamin Day? And yet he was the one who changed everything.
Until the 1830s, newspapers had been largely a labor of love. Nobody had ever made money putting out a newspaper. Benjamin Franklin, in the years before the revolution, famously published a paper called The Pennsylvania Gazette, but with his little hand press he couldn’t print more than a few hundred copies. Yes, he had a few ads, but advertisers didn’t pay much to reach such a small circulation. So what paid Franklin’s rent was not his newspaper but his almanac. Other would-be publishers up through the first part of the 19th century were faced with same uninspiring economics.
What Benjamin Day was the first to realize was that the steam-powered press could revolutionize the economics of the news. Circulation could be boosted up from a few hundred to tens of thousands. And with this change the advertising revenue could increase so much that it hardly mattered whether a subscription actually covered the cost of the paper. The existing newspapers of the day all sold for six cents or more (average daily wage that year in New York was a little more than three dollars). Day took a deep breath and set the price of the Sun at one cent. It was the first penny press in the world. It was so successful that it made Benjamin Day a multi-millionaire, the first press tycoon.
The Sun was also the first newspaper to have much news. The earlier papers couldn’t afford to hire reporters or stringers or pay for travel and living. News is expensive, but opinion is cheap. Opinion involves nothing more than one opinionated person sitting down and writing it. So the pre-New York Sun papers had lots of opinion and almost no news. With advertising revenue pouring in, Day hired reporters and news-gatherers to change that balance. His papers were full of news because news appealed to his readers.
Some of those readers were women. The six-cent papers — aligned as they were with political parties and clubs — ignored women because women couldn’t vote. But Day realized that they could buy. He provided news of interest to women and advertiser arrived in droves to reward him.
Finally Day and his successors formed the Associated Press, a consortium of many papers to share the cost of collecting news from abroad. Since it had to serve papers with drastically different political stances, the AP adopted a rigorous policy of fact-only news reporting, no subjective content. This was a breakthrough; it had never been seen before.
We modern news consumers owe a debt of gratitude to Benjamin Day and The New York Sun. They provided proof of three essential truths:
• Newspapers could be economically solvent
• Newspapers could contain more news than opinion
• Newspapers could make a rigorous distinction between facts and opinion about the facts
Those three ideas were well established by the time Benjamin Day died in 1889. We might just wish they were still so well established today.
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