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THE FIRST PENNY PRESS PAPER

  • stories, he could greatly expand the paper's circulation by appealing to the common Working-class reader. Advertiser s were then willing to pay more for ad space, permitting Day to drop the price per daily paper from five cents to just one. Day's "penny press" is often identified as the first time that reading material was truly affordable to common people, and the ''Sun'' is credited as being the first penny press newspaper.


  • "Sensationalist" here uses the older meaning of the term, referring to an emphasis on common interest, rather than aristocratic, events written as "news," not as essays. In a nutshell, the old meaning of "sensationalist" equals the earliest concept of "news."



TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS

It took more than just Day's business sense and populism to produce the penny press. In the preceding half century, the Printing Press underwent several important technological innovations, in keeping with the Industrial Revolution of the time. By the time Day established the ''Sun'', the printing press frame was converted from wood to steel, the press was steam powered, and the printing surface was a cylindrical cast of the letter punches. More innovations would follow shortly after, including the switch from printing on discrete pieces of paper to printing on continuous rolls.


POLITICAL FACTORS

Political and demographic changes were also significant. Much of the success of the newspaper in the early United States owes itself to the attitude of the gains mention in the First Amendment to the Constitution , and though early politicians, including Jefferson, occasionally made attempts to rein in the press, newspapers flourished in the new nation.

However, the penny press was originally apolitical both in content and in attitude. As Michael Schudson describes in ''Discovering the News'', the ''Sun'' once replaced their congressional news section with this statement: "The proceedings of Congress thus far, would not interest our readers." The major socio-political changes brought on by the development of the penny press were themselves helped by the penny press' focus on working-class people and their interests. Thus an apolitical attitude was, ironically, a political factor influencing the advancement of the penny press.


DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS

Soon after Benjamin Day's ''New York Sun'' began selling papers for a penny, James Gordon Bennett started the '' New York Herald '' in 1835 , and Horace Greeley started the '' New York Tribune '' in 1841 . Three daily penny press papers in one city were possible because of the large population of New York City and surrounding cities, due to the recent urbanization in industrialized New England . By the 1830s the general population had become both sufficiently localized and sufficiently literate that a penny press newspaper could have a weekly circulation of 50,000. For comparison, the influential '' Spectator '' of a little over a century earlier had a maximum circulation per issue of about 4,000.


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