Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [419]
What the Sun did have was local news that would interest an audience of artisans. Breezy, brightly written pieces sketched the daily life of ordinary New Yorkers. Snappy, even sensational stories covered unusual events—“fires, theatrical performances, elephants escaping from circus, women trampled by hogs.”
Crime news was made to order for Day. There wasn’t any competition—the blanket sheets found such stories embarrassing and bad for business—and it was cheap and easy to gather. For four dollars a week, Day dispatched unemployed printer George Wisner to record the vivid dramas of police court. With coarse humor and flippant style, the Sun offered accounts of domestic tribulation and drunkenness (husband beats and chokes wife to death in drunken rage), scandals (reverend arrested for rape), tales of thieves, whores, and arsonists. Chronicles of crime were not new, but crime news was.
“Police Reports” became the Sun’s most popular section for many reasons. Sex and violence were titillating. The narratives were familiar to readers accustomed to sensational street literature. They comfortably incorporated everyday speech, the kind of dialect, colloquialisms, and slang never found in elite papers. They provided New Yorkers with useful and important information about the way their city worked. They often contained a sharp-edged, critical component—reminiscent of the radical papers—in holding up instances of gentry pretension, hypocrisy, favoritism, violations of equal justice, abuse of state power, corruption. In one instance—the provision of gruesomely detailed accounts of executions, which had been recently privatized—crime news served to reassure a populace that remained highly suspicious of such closed-door dealings.
Crime stories were paralleled in popularity by the occasional hoaxes the paper concocted. In August 1835 Day began publishing a series of articles recounting life on the moon—spherical amphibians rolling about—as supposedly revealed by a powerful new telescope. These good-humored impostures, together with reports of curiosities and monstrosities, resembled crime reports in offering readers a chance to play detective and decide their truth or falsity. Both were forms of voyeurism at a distance, dependent for their impact on the fact that some parts of the city were now as little known as the surface of the moon.
The Sun was a runaway success. Within four months its circulation of four thousand brought it abreast of Webb’s Courier and Enquirer. By 1834 Day had made enough money to install a machine press with a capacity of a thousand copies per hour, equal to the demands of his paper’s now ten thousand purchasers. A year later, with readership at fifteen thousand, he switched to a steam press with an hourly capacity of fifty-five hundred. During the moon hoax, daily circulation hit twenty thousand: four times that of the most successful sixpenny, more than the Methodists’ weekly Christian Advocateand Journal, and more than the London Times. The Sun had become, for the moment, the biggest-selling paper in the world.
Day had promised that the Sun would be an “advantageous medium for advertising,” and circulation figures like these brought advertisers flocking. Ads were not new, of course. The mercantile and political sheets had long filled six or eight columns of a page with tiny ten-line squares of text that, in minuscule typeface, called the attention of a select audience to goods and services. Day sold space on a cash, not an annual, basis and included “Help Wanted” notices for cooks, maids, coachmen, bricklayers, and men to open oysters in restaurant kitchens. These increased the paper’s popularity with readers looking for jobs—or for servants—and though many of the elite denounced the Sun for pandering to the vulgar mob, businessmen were not about to pass up the opportunity to purvey their wares to the enormous local market it had revealed.
Success bred competition. In 1834 two former colleagues of Day’s started the New York Transcript, placing it under the editorial control