Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [538]
No one was more adept at speeding news to press than Moses Yale Beach, proprietor of the Sun. But it was obvious to Beach that telegraphy required rewriting the rules of the news-gathering game. Wire companies swamped with usage demands had restricted each paper to a scant fifteen minutes of transmission time before passing the wire to competitors, effectively eliminating electric scoops. As the construction of private lines was beyond the capacity of even the biggest metropolitan dailies, cooperation, not costly competition, was now in the interest of the New York papers—especially as they faced a collective threat from Boston, where Cunard’s vessels still made first landfall in the States, bearing the latest news from Europe.
In June 1846, accordingly, Beach brokered an arrangement among six leading papers (the Sun, Tribune, Herald, Journal of Commerce, Courier and Enquirer, and Express). They agreed to collaborate in procuring Mexican War updates and, as well, to share the cost of transmitting political and congressional news from Washington. The associated papers also deftly bypassed Boston in 1849 by spurring Britain’s Maritime Provinces to link New York to Halifax, the Cunarders’ first hemispheric port of call. The group also formally established a Harbor News Association and jointly chartered a steamer—the Newsboy—to intercept incoming vessels off Sandy Hook. New Yorkers had locked in their control over the collection of information from Europe.
In the 1850s, the combination—soon to be known as the Associated Press (AP)—moved to dominate news distribution as well. AP agents, placed in major cities, gathered stories produced by local papers, then flashed them to headquarters in New York. There they were consolidated and wired back out to a client base that soon included the great majority of America’s newspapers. Opponents cried monopoly, and they were right. The AP, in conjunction with New York City’s cable and telegraph companies, had cornered the information market. Subscribing newspapers were forbidden from any independent use of telegraphy, barred even from receiving dispatches written by their own reporters.
Manhattan’s papers thrived. By 1853 the circulation of Bennett’s Herald had jumped to fifty-two thousand, making it the country’s most profitable daily. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was running a close second, and its weekly edition was probably the most widely circulated journal in America. Within the city itself, combined daily circulation shot from one paper per every 16 residents in 1830 to one for every 4.5 in 1850 (and 1 per 2.2 on Sundays).
The rise was due in no small part to the penny papers’ explicitly addressing themselves to both sexes as readers, unlike the older, strictly male-oriented commercial press. The newspapers proved hospitable to women writers as well. In 1841 the Boston abolitionist Lydia Maria Child was a rarity when she moved to New York to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and as the first woman to edit a journal of public policy, she was kept at arm’s length by the male New York press. But after Child dramatically increased the Standard’s circulation and published her urban reportage as Letters from New York (1843, 1845), professionals like Bryant accepted her claim to a literary vocation.
Margaret Fuller, another pioneer, had been a highly respected editor of the Dial, the literary magazine founded by Emerson up in Concord. In 1844, at Horace Greeley’s urging, she moved to New York and joined the Tribune’s staff. Mostly she wrote on acceptably female subjects like literature and music, but Fuller also did pieces on slums, prisons, and almshouses—becoming the Tribune’s woman-about-town. In 1846 Greeley even dispatched Fuller, an avid supporter of Garibaldi and Mazzini, to cover the fight for an Italian republic. (In 1850 the ship bringing her back to New York sank off Fire Island in a storm;