DAY, BENJAMIN
Benjamin Day (April 10, 1810–December 21, 1889) founded
the New York Morning Sun, the first successful penny newspaper in America, in 1833. As its publisher for the next five
years, he introduced new ideas for the content, sales, and
distribution of newspapers, ideas that had wide-ranging
implications for the rise of a mass-circulation press in New
York and other major cities.
Born April 10, 1810, in West Springfield, Massachusetts,
Day was the son of Henry Day, a hatter, and Mary Ely, a
descendant of one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact.
At fourteen, Benjamin Day was apprenticed to printer Samuel Bowles, founder of the Springfi eld Republican. After
five years of learning the printer’s trade at the Republican,
Day left for New York City, where he found work at the
Evening Post and the Journal of Commerce. In 1832, he
started his own print shop, a decision that turned out to be a
first step toward publishing his own newspaper.
As Day himself described it in a speech in 1851, the idea
of launching a paper was prompted by a slump in his printing business caused by the New York cholera epidemic of
1832. Models for the content, pricing, and distribution of
a new kind of newspaper already existed in England, and
a short-lived attempt to introduce such a paper in New
York was made in early 1833. Possibly because of the failure of that venture, the Morning Post, Day later claimed
that he had little faith in his own project but nevertheless proceeded with it, and on September 3, 1833, the first issue
of the Sun was published. Its prospectus promised to “lay
before the public, at a price within the means of everyone,
ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time
afford an advantageous medium for advertising.”
It was readily evident that the four-page newcomer was
different from the existing political and mercantile papers,
the “six-pennies.” Its price was one cent, and instead of
being sold through subscriptions and delivered to the reader’s home, the Sun’s primary means of distribution was
street sales. Under the so-called “London plan,” carriers
bought copies of the paper from Day at a discount and then
sold them directly to readers, keeping what they were paid.
Just as Day’s method of distribution borrowed ideas
from the British capital, so did the Sun’s content. Day by
and large eschewed the political and economic news that
dominated the pages of the six-pennies and instead offered
human interest items from the city’s police court. That such
content had relatively little news value was evident from the
fact that the Sun at times clipped “London Police” stories
from English papers when there was not enough time to
gather it locally.
As press historian Sidney Kobre noted, the primary purpose of the Sun in its early years was to entertain rather
than inform, and that purpose was obvious in the paper’s
most notorious story, the moon hoax. Published in 1835, it
consisted of a series of articles ostensibly reprinted from
a Scottish scientific journal that claimed that an astronomer had discovered human-like beings on the moon. After
Day’s competitors exposed the hoax, the Sun’s editors
remained coy about the stories’ veracity, and they repeatedly noted the stories had provided good entertainment for
readers. The hoax had also boasted the Sun’s circulation to
nineteen thousand, according to Day, supposedly making
the New York penny paper the largest in the world. A year
after the moon hoax, circulation had increased even further,
reaching thirty thousand. The episode suggested that entertaining readers could be more profitable than merely giving
them the “facts.”
A publisher rather than an editor, Day relied on skillful
writers such as George Wisner and Richard Adams Locke
to provide the editorial content of his paper. He still exerted
a degree of influence over the content, however, insisting
that the Sun’s editorials be politically neutral and that each
issue contain literary items such as essays and poems. As
the head of a thriving business enterprise, Day also concerned himself with making advertising revenue more stable by insisting on payment in advance, and he made sure
that the paper’s growing circulation was made technically
possible by purchasing a steam-driven press.
In 1838, Day sold the Sun to his brother-in-law, Moses
Y. Beach, a move he later regretted. For the next twenty-five
years, he involved himself in several publishing enterprises,
including another penny paper called the True Sun and a literary weekly entitled Brother Jonathan. Day retired during
the Civil War and lived the rest of his life off his personal
wealth. He died in New York City December 21, 1889.
Further Reading
Bjork, Ulf Jonas. “’Sweet Is the Tale”’: A Context For the New
York Sun’s Moon Hoax.”
American Journalism 18, no. 4 (2001): 13–27.
Bradshaw, James Stanford. “Day, Benjamin Henry.” In Biographical Dictionary of American Journalism, edited by Joseph P.
McKerns, 171–173. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
“Day, Benjamin Henry.” In The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. 13, 307–308. New York: James T. White
& Company, 1906.
Kobre, Sidney. Foundations of American Journalism. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1970.
O’Brien, Frank Michael. The Story of the Sun, New York: 1833–
1928. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1928.
Thompson, Susan. The Penny Press: the Origins of the Modern News Media, 1833–1861. Northport, AL: Vision Press,
2004.
Whitby, Gary L. “Horns of a Dilemma: The Sun, Abolition, And
the 1833–34 New York Riots.” Journalism Quarterly 67, no.
2 (1990): 410–419.
Ulf Jonas Bjork