Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [539]
Along with new readers and new writers, new technology made the expansion possible. What the telegraph was to getting a story, the rotary press was to getting it out. Patented in 1846 by New York City’s Richard Hoe, it could produce over twenty thousand copies per hour, permitting a paper to be printed far more quickly, with far fresher news. In the 1850s, moreover, papermaking machines emerged to provide Hoe’s “Lightning” presses with newsprint made from wood pulp rather than scarce cotton and linen rags, breaking another bottleneck.
The housing of mammoth presses, the steam engines to power them, and growing numbers of correspondents, bookkeepers, typesetters, and press operators required ever larger accommodations. By the 1850s the Tribune employed fifty people (not counting the hundred employees it shared with the Associated Press) and filled a five-story Park Row building. Bennett had moved the Herald to larger quarters on Fulton and Nassau in 1842, but after 1848, when he switched to Lightning presses and his workforce topped two hundred, he was forced to expand into three adjoining buildings.
Large premises, costly presses, sizable staffs, and telegraphic services—all drove expenses skyward. To offset rising costs, owners boosted advertising rates, justifying hikes by pointing to increased circulation. As Greeley noted in 1841, “We lose money on our circulation by itself considered, but with 20,000 subscribers we can command such Advertising and such prices for it as will render our enterprise a remunerating one.” In the late 1840s, while a firm might still pay sixty dollars a year for ads in the oldfashioned Journal of Commerce, a similar amount of copy in the Herald could cost over a thousand.
The increase in business precipitated the first advertising agencies. Enterprising young brokers tramped lower Manhattan’s publishing district, buying space from newspapers, then hawking it to patent medicine manufactures and dry-goods emporiums. No one touted the new profession’s benefits more ardently than Volney B. Palmer, selfstyled “Morse of commercial intercourse.” By the end of the 1840s Palmer had established offices in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Baltimore and was proclaiming that “the day will come when a man will as readily think of walking without feet. . . as of success without advertising.”
Even with enhanced ad revenues, it now required substantial capital to establish a newspaper. It was still possible—at least in Brooklyn—for artisan printers to enter the business, especially when backed by politicians. The Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, established in 1841 to promote the party’s fortunes, would remain more or less a one-man operation for years. But in Manhattan, only one entrant in the mass circulation sweepstakes succeeded during the mid-century boom: Henry Jarvis Raymond’s New-York Daily Times.
Unlike the founding generation of penny press entrepreneurs, Henry Raymond had no links to the Trades. He came to work for Horace Greeley straight from college, then moved to James Watson Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, where he rose to become managing editor. Here Raymond established solid conservative credentials by attacking socialism (a “stupendous humbug”) in a six-month print duel with his former employer. In 1849 he was elected as a Whig to the Assembly. In 1851, as a leader of what Bennett called the “Wall Street clique,” the thirty-year-old Raymond was chosen as speaker.
That summer a group of Whig bankers surveyed the penny press field with disaffected eyes. Bennett’s Herald seemed too flamboyant, the Sun too plebeian, and Horace Greeley, though a stalwart Whig, had dedicated the Tribune to promoting social justice “causes.” The dailies’ collective prosperity, however, suggested there might be room for another penny press—more agreeably conservative in style and politics. The Whig magnates, accordingly, chose the reliably orthodox Raymond to found the Times (the eighth to bear that name). They