On this day in New York · May 6, 1835
Bennett Launches the New York Herald
A Scottish immigrant with $500 and a cellar office decided New York didn't need another party newspaper, it needed one that answered to nobody.
The facts
- First issue
- May 6, 1835
- Founder
- James Gordon Bennett Sr., born September 1, 1795, in Newmill, Banffshire, Scotland
- Starting capital
- $500, run out of a cellar office with Bennett as the only employee
- Growth
- By 1845 it was the most popular and profitable daily newspaper in the United States; by 1861 it circulated 84,000 copies a day
On May 6, 1835, James Gordon Bennett Sr. put out the first issue of the New York Herald from a cramped cellar office, with $500 in capital and no staff besides himself. Bennett was a Scottish immigrant who had spent years trying and failing to launch papers of his own before this one stuck. He built the Herald as a cheap daily that took no party's money and no party's line, at a time when most New York papers were mouthpieces for the Democrats or the Whigs. Readers responded to news written fast, cheap, and free of any machine's fingerprints, and the bet paid off far quicker than Bennett had any right to expect.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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We shall support no party, be the agent of no faction or coterie, and we care nothing for any election, or any candidate from president down to constable.
New York Herald, editorial policy stated in its first issue, May 6, 1835
Source: Wikipedia -
is not to instruct but to startle and amuse.
James Gordon Bennett Sr., on what he believed a newspaper's job was
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Bennett's formula, cheap, fast, and beholden to no political machine, is the direct ancestor of every New York tabloid that came after it, and a reminder that this city's papers have always had to win readers rather than inherit them.
Sources
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