penny press
penny press, a type of newspaper that, with its emphasis on news of interest to non-elites, redefined news as the unusual, the bizarre, and the sensational. Its emergence in the United States in the 1830s contributed to changes that would define American journalism for more than 100 years.
Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and massive population growth fueled the emergence of the penny press in the United States. It stimulated an interest in current affairs and reading among American citizens. It also produced some of the most legendary editors and reporters in the history of American journalism: James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, and Henry Raymond, to name perhaps the three most prominent.
While most penny papers have long since folded, a few have survived into the 2020s. Those include The New York Times, Boston Herald, Baltimore Sun, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Savannah Morning News, and Richmond-Times Dispatch. This entry discusses the origins of the penny press, factors in its popularity, and its key characteristics.
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The penny press ushered in the age of the mass society and mass media that met the information needs and goals of the public and led to an age of “democratic reading,” according to historian Isabelle Lehuu in her Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Its seeds would not fully blossom until the end of the 19th century, and it was a form that would never take root outside of urban centers, but the penny press would make news of a type available to all takers.
Some, such as journalism historian John Nerone, see that the penny press not as a revolution in journalism practice but a mutation. In a 1987 Critical Studies in Mass Communication article, Nerone argues the changes in journalistic practice represented by the penny press are more “responses to changes in specific environments rather than discoveries of fundamental human truths (e.g., the people want news, not opinions) or new principles (e.g., political independence).” In other words, he claims the change in newspaper practices was a response to a change in the social environment. Whether revolution or evolution, the penny press represented a shift in both definitions and practices of journalism.
Origins
The penny press began with the first issue of the New York Sun, which appeared on September 3, 1833. Editor Benjamin Day declared in his opening editorial that the paper would provide “ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY” at a price—1 cent—that anyone could afford. Standard newspapers, which typically cost six cents, were out of the reach of the average working person. Day hit on a gold mine. Within two months, the paper had a circulation of 2,000. In 1836, the paper claimed to have a circulation greater than that of 11 of its more elite six-cent competitors. Five years after its founding, in 1838, the paper claimed to have a circulation of 30,000.
Day was not the first to experiment with this new newspaper formula. Penny newspapers, and even magazines, were already publishing in England by the early 1830s. In the United States, as early as 1826, some newspapers were already expanding their definition of news to include the topics the penny press thrived on. One example is the Boston Transcript. In late July 1830, editor Lynde M. Walter and his partners brought out the Transcript as a penny paper. He had to suspend it after three days, however, to have more time to build up advertising and subscriptions. The suspension lasted about a month. By the end of August, the paper was back on the streets. It was not a typical penny paper, however, for its subject matter was more literary. Walter ran the paper until his death in 1842, at which time his sister, Cornelia Wells Walter, formerly the paper’s theater critic, took over the editorship. She ran the paper until 1847 and was one of the first women to edit a major city daily.
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The Sun was published from September 1833 until 1950. The paper’s slogan was “It Shines For All.” The paper focused on publishing news that would interest ordinary people—suicides, deaths, crimes, and divorces, and it defined reporting as storytelling. This Sun demonstrated that a newspaper could succeed on individual sales and advertising instead of high-priced subscriptions, which was the more common marketing strategy most journals used. Day’s objective was to publish a paper that provided news at a price anyone could afford. Another of Day’s innovations, borrowed from England, was street sales of individual copies by newsboys. The Sun began publishing during an economic downturn, but it was an immediate success, proving Day’s formula and price were appropriate for an urban audience.
Besides its low price and tabloid size, penny newspapers differed in some ways from the more typical staid political press in its offerings. Rather than publishing long political harangues from editors who were tightly knit into political party structures, penny newspapers covered sports, crime, sex, society, gossip, and religion on the local, national, and international levels. They appealed to emotions and were rather moralistic in their coverage, in that they focused on stories taught moral lessons while avoiding those that were shameful or immoral.
Human interest stories with an emphasis on crime news were another hallmark of the penny press. Covering crime news was an important component in the development of another penny press innovation: reporters. The elite press relied on in-house editorials and correspondence, some paid and some not, from outsiders for content. Penny newspapers produced in-house content as well, but its different definition of news required men to go out to courts or police stations and gather news directly from the source rather than waiting for it to come to them in their offices.
Factors in popularity
Several factors contributed to the rise of the penny press. First was the massive growth in the U.S. population during the early 19th century, fueled largely by immigrants who flocked to American cities, particularly those in the northeast such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. In his opening editorial in 1851, Henry Raymond, editor of The New York Times, wrote that the city’s growing population was one factor in the decision to start another daily newspaper in the city. Literacy rates were on the rise as well. These two factors produced an ever-expanding audience for news. Another vitally important factor was the development of the steam-driven printing press, which allowed for huge numbers of copies to be printed. While the older hand presses might be able to strike off 350 papers a day, steam presses could produce up to 4,000 pages in an hour.
This was a period, too, of democratization in the United States. After traveling in the United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about how engaged with their democracy Americans were. He reported that they always had their noses in a newspaper and that they were always joining associations. Contemporary historians have made similar observations. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, for example, have written that American citizens in the 19th century were highly engaged with public life, that they paid close attention, and that they had a deep and broad understanding of the day’s issues. The working poor may not have been interested in the same issues as the political and business elites, but they were interested in what was happening in their communities, and that interest helped build an audience for the penny newspaper. Some have even seen the rapid growth and expansion of the cheap press as a product of American individualism and independence.
Key characteristics
New York City became the center of operation for this new kind of newspaper. Before long, Bennett’s New York Herald and Greeley’s New-York Tribune would follow. About a decade later, Raymond and George Jones would found The New York Times as a penny paper. Journalists in other cities followed suit and established penny newspapers in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, Richmond, Baltimore, and even Savannah, Georgia, during the 1850s.
These newspapers were highly competitive. In 1838 and 1839, Bennett, for example, established a pigeon express between Washington and Baltimore and a pony express between Washington and New York. He made arrangements with other editors to attach news bulletins to pigeons and fly them off to New York. Even when the telegraph came online a few years later, the pigeon coop remained atop the Herald building. The Herald’s competitors despaired of ever competing with that paper’s speedy acquisition of news, and one, the Journal of Commerce, eventually gave up and created a cooperative agreement with the Herald that would become instrumental in the creation of the Associated Press.
The Herald also was important in developing American war reporting. It was the only New York newspaper to send a correspondent to cover the Mexican-American War, and the paper made extensive use of the telegraph to provide the latest news as fast as possible. During the American Civil War, the paper maintained a corps of war correspondents and even opened a Southern desk. The paper’s correspondents went to great lengths, including using couriers, to ensure news got back to the New York office in less than 36 hours.
These newspapers marked a radical change in the nature and definition of news. The newspaper was established as a democratic, capitalist institution with ownership firmly in the hands of individuals. While these newspapers focused on sensational topics, they were not entirely disconnected from politics. Their editors were heavily involved in politics, and that would not change, though politics was not the be-all and end-all concern of their newspapers. Their political activities, however, were of their own choosing and not, like the 19th century political press, determined by party leaders. The two different forms of journalism competed side-by-side.
The penny press is sometimes credited with introducing the concept of objectivity into news, but while some stories might have been treated objectively, objectivity was not truly a value of the penny press. One has only to look at a story like the Great Moon Hoax to realize that. The Great Moon Hoax was a serialized story published in 1835 by the Sun, probably to help circulation grow. The stories maintained that astronomers had developed an extraordinary new telescope that had allowed them to discover life on the moon, and they detailed the nature of that life, including men with bat-like wings and a biped beaver that lived in huts and were seemingly acquainted with the domestic use of fire. The story was attributed to a work allegedly published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science by Sir John Herschel. Readers may have heard of the journal, because it had, in fact, existed. However, at the time of the Moan Hoax, the journal had been defunct for some two years. The article was actually the brainchild of Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke.
Both readers and, and other newspapers fell for the hoax readers and other newspapers. The Herald had been out of commission for about a month due to a fire at its offices. When it came back into print, Bennett wrote an article casting doubt on the story. Locke denied the story was a hoax. The story made Locke enormously famous and brought in many new readers for the Sun.
The penny press also served an important function in spreading information so that all Americans could participate in their democracy. Circulations of these newspapers were orders of magnitude larger than their political or religious brethren. The New York Tribune, for example, achieved a circulation of more than 200,000, at a time when the average newspaper would have a circulation of maybe 1,000 to 2,000. While penny papers had greater political independence than the partisan press, they carried political content that would have helped immigrants understand more about American politics and encouraged them to get engaged with the political system of their new country. The rise of the penny press, which resulted in the creation of a mass press, helped to diversify those who embraced and were embraced by the moniker “American.”
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.