Penny press

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Penny press newspapers were cheap, tabloid-style papers produced in the middle of the 19th century.

History

Most newspapers in the early nineteenth century cost six cents and were distributed through subscriptions. On July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Unlike most later penny papers, Walter's Transcript maintained what was considered good taste, featuring coverage of literature and the theater.

The penny press arrived in New York on January 1, 1833, when Horatio David Shepard teamed up with Horace Greeley and Francis W. Story and issued the Morning Post. Although both Greeley and Story went on to fame and fortune in the New York press world, the concept of bringing out a penny paper belonged exclusively to Shepard. He made a habit of taking daily walks through the teeming streets of the Bowery, where he observed merchants selling small items for a penny a piece. He also took note of the fact that sales were brisk.^[1]

Later that year, publisher Benjamin Day introduced The Sun. The Sun appealed to a wider audience, using a simpler, more direct style, vivid language, and human interest stories.^[2]

James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald added another dimension to penny press newspapers, now common in journalistic practice. Whereas newspapers had generally relied on documents as sources, Bennett introduced the practices of observation and interviewing to provide the stories with more vivid details.^[3]

Political factors

Political and demographic changes were also significant. Much of the success of the newspaper in the early United States owed itself to the attitude of the "founding fathers" toward the press. Many of them saw the free press as one of the most essential elements in maintaining the liberty and social equality of citizens. Thomas Jefferson said he considered the free press as even more important than the government itself: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate any moment to prefer the latter." It was because of his attitude that freedom of the press gained mention in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and though early politicians, including Jefferson, occasionally made attempts to rein in the press, newspapers flourished in the new nation.

However, the penny press was originally apolitical both in content and in attitude. As Michael Schudson describes in Discovering the News, the Sun once replaced their congressional news section with this statement: "The proceedings of Congress thus far, would not interest our readers." The major social-political changes brought on by the development of the penny press were themselves helped by the penny press' focus on working-class people and their interests. Thus an apolitical attitude was, ironically, a political factor influencing the advancement of the penny press.

Demographic factors

Following the success of The Sun, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. started the New York Herald in 1835, and Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune in 1841. Three daily penny papers in one city were possible because the recent urbanization in industrialized New England had swollen the population of New York City and surrounding cities. By the 1830s, the general population had become both sufficiently localized and sufficiently literate that a penny newspaper could have a weekly circulation of 50,000. For comparison, the influential Spectator of a little over a century earlier had a maximum circulation per issue of about 4,000.

References

1. ^ David R. Spencer, The Yellow Journalism (Northwestern University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-8101-2331-2), p. 24.
2. ^ Bird, S. Elizabeth. For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992: 12-17.
3. ^ Francke, Warren T. "Sensationalism and the Development of Reporting in the Nineteenth Century: The Broom Sweeps Sensory Details." Paper presented at Conference on Sensationalism and the Media (Ann Arbor, Mich.), 1986.

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