Everything about Penny Press totally explained
Penny press newspapers were cheap,
tabloid-style papers produced in the middle of the 19th century.
The first penny press papers
In
1833, publisher
Benjamin Day introduced the
The New York Sun, the first penny press newspaper. Day discovered that he could broaden the paper's readership by lowering its price to a penny and selling it on the streets. Most newspapers at the time cost six cents and were distributed through subscriptions. The
Sun appealed to a wider audience, using a simpler, more direct style, vivid language, and
human interest stories.
James Gordon Bennett's
New York Herald added another dimension to penny press newspapers, now common in journalistic practice. Whereas newspapers generally relied on documents as sources, Bennett introduced the practices of observation and interviewing to provide the stories with more vivid details.
Political factors
Political and demographic changes were also significant. Much of the success of the newspaper in the early United States owes 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 shouldn't hesitate any moment to prefer the latter." It was because of his attitude that
freedom of the press gains 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, wouldn't 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
Soon after Benjamin Day's
New York Sun began selling papers for a penny,
James Gordon Bennett, Sr. started the
New York Herald in
1835, and
Horace Greeley started the
New York Tribune in
1841. Three daily penny press 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 press 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.
Further Information
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