How Horace Greeley legitimized newspapers and saved the media from itself

Thursday, December 3, 1840. A New Jersey bank president disappeared in broad daylight, leaving his New Brunswick office around 10 a.m. and was never seen alive again. Some say he went to Texas, others say he went to Europe. Either way, there were no leads for six days. Next, a penniless carpenter is seen holding a "beautiful gold watch" and "incredibly rich" bragging about his newfound freedom from mortgages. The path leads to his home, down the steps into his cellar, beneath hastily laid floors and into the dirt below. There, in a shallow ditch, lay a bereft banker in rags, his watch missing, his skull split from an axe.

The details of the story are familiar. We know it from Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 gothic horror novel "The Confession of the Heart," in which a murderer is killed by the pounding hearts of his victims buried beneath the floorboards. torture. Poe knew the story because he read the newspaper. If you were alive, literate, or just remotely in touch with New York or Philadelphia (where Poe lived) in 1840 and 1841, you probably know this story, too. You know this because the cheap newspapers have been reporting it in all its gory detail for months, and in Poe's story these details are held on ruthlessly with a heart beating beneath the floorboards. After all, daily newspapers need readers to survive, and the more gruesome and gruesome the murder, the greater the benefit to readers.

, but one American editor looked in another direction, hoping to elevate rather than titillate. Horace Greeley thought he could fix America's newspapers, a medium transformed by the emergence of urban pop journalism, a medium whose claims were audacious, whose content was sensational and, in Greeley's view, completely derelict in its duties.

As the murder trial of a bank manager ended in April 1841, and with the murderer on his way to the gallows, Greeley had just launched the daily newspaper that would make him famous, the New York Tribune. He should leave no stone unturned on the New Brunswick case. But the Tribune cited it only twice. First, Greeley published a brief editorial about the murderer's execution, but not much more: no reporters were present, no mention of "Peter Robinson's last moments," "the rope was broken," or the "terrible excitement." "The eye-catching headline.

Then, two days later, Greeley let go, not revisiting the killings or meditating on the lessons of the hangings, except to lambaste the newspapers that eagerly reported on both. He wrote that the report amounted to a "plague-ridden, lifeless history" and that the editors who produced it were as hateful as the murderers themselves. "The crime of murder may not stain their hands," Greeley snarled, "but the worse crime of making murderers... lies in their souls, and will rest there forever." Greeley offered him of the Tribune, and crafted the editorial personas behind them in response to the cheap dailies and the new urban scene that animated them. He believes that newspapers exist for the great work of "intelligence"; newspapers exist to provide information, but also to guide and promote, not to entertain.

Greeley broke into New York City in 1831 as a 20-year-old printer. He came from a New England family that had lost its farm. Like thousands of seaweed seeds arriving in New York, he was unprepared for what he found. With a population of over 200,000, Gotham is an incredible boomtown. It is a wild novelty in the United States due to social and political strife, frequent disasters and epidemics, and its own rapid growth rate. Farm boy Horace Greeley came to New York City in 1831. 1872 Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune: From His Birth to the Present Day. (Courtesy Internet Archive Book Image/Flickr)

At least there is still a lot of printing work to be done. The second year after Greeley arrived in New York, there were 64 newspapers in New York, 13 of which were daily newspapers. In many ways, though, the city's fantastic new reality is still being embraced by the press. The main page of the "Daily News" is a small section of expensive 6-cent "blanket paper". This is a business newspaper, oriented to the interests of businessmen, priced for businessmen's wallets, and spread out in businessmen's pockets. When on a desk, the size of the paper can be up to 5 feet wide. The remaining newspapers in New York were weeklies and semi-weeklies devoted to particular political parties, reform movements, or literary interests. They rose and fell like the tide on a city's docks,

The newspaper business was a tough job, but in 1833, a printer named Benjamin Day set out to solve the problem. The New York Sun looked, felt, read, and sold like no other daily newspaper in New York at the time. Told by newsboys on the street and costing just a penny, it was a tiny thing, measuring only 7.5/8 inches by 10.1/4 inches, and filled with stories that illuminated the dark corners of the city. In a place where newspapers mostly eschew local coverage, Day and his reporters let the city's noisy daily carnival ring out from tiny pages and cramped columns.

's formula is simple: "We newspaper people thrive on other people's disasters," Day said.

There's plenty of fodder out there, whether it's "fires, theatrical performances, elephants escaping from a circus, or women being trampled by pigs." If an accident, a crime scene, a police court, or a smoldering ruin doesn't provide the imposition, the sun will make it some other way. Take, for example, the summer of 1835, when the newspaper famously created the "Moon Hoax" with a series of bogus articles about lunar life forms seen through new telescopes. That same year, a traveling editor named James Gordon Bennett launched his New York Herald. There, he perfected the model pioneered that day by positioning himself in an all-knowing, omniscient editorial role. Bennet became fully famous in 1836 when the Sun and the Herald dueled over coverage of the murder of a policeman. His newsletter offered a gruesome account gleaned from the crime scene, which he claimed to have access to as "Public Security Editor"; his editorial took a bold, possibly erroneous, position that the prime suspect, a The young clerk, from an established Connecticut family, was innocent. The Herald's circulation soon surpassed that of the Sun, and even attracted some respectable middle-class readers.

The age of newspapers had arrived, and Bennet crowned himself a champion. "Shakespeare was the genius of the drama, the Scott of fiction, the Milton and Byron of poetry," he cheered, "and I mean the genius of newspapers." Books, plays, and even religion had their Have a "good day"; now, "a newspaper can send more souls to heaven and save more souls from hell than all the churches and chapels in New York, besides making money at the same time. < /p>

Greeley, a conservative New England Puritan, watched in horror. Bennet and Day were making money, but they were doing so by destroying souls rather than saving them. Cheap newspapers betrayed the greatness of newspapers. The power of the press, which had shirked the editor's enormous directive responsibility, was squandered in an unseemly campaign. These "tendencies," Greeley recalled in 1841, "were in urgent need of resistance and correction." ,

Resistance and correction found several expressions, starting with Greeley's first essay, The Political and Intelligence Weekly, in 1834, which became known as The New Yorker. , Greeley promises to "weave together the wisdom of an ethical, practical and educational actor"; he promises to avoid "fascinating slap traps" and "experiments in the gullibility of the public"; he promises to "not "Fakely" does it all.

There are problems with this approach, starting with the fact that it does not pay. Greeley's limited correspondence in The New Yorker's 1834-1841 campaign Revealing that the editor has been on the verge of a financial crisis, there is not much market for the teaching and promotion of print editions, even for $3 a year. He said to a friend: "I write too many articles that have no practical value." . ". "There's nothing Los people like to teach. "Teachings, if offered, are best given in small doses, with "sweets and pepper sauce" to bring them down. Horace Greeley, editorial staff of the Tribune, circa 1850s. Greeley seated Third from left. (Courtesy Matthew Brady, Library of Congress) And another question: How much can a newspaper do to correct the sins of other newspapers? Printed content, like paper currency, is this. The root of the era's recurring financial crises: Too much paper money, and no one knew how much it was worth The same week Greeley made his New Yorker debut, another city newspaper ran a mock job ad looking for " newspaper-reading machine,” an ad that could “sift chaff from wheat,” “obtain useful facts from useless fiction, and create counterfeit money from raw metal.”

Still, Greeley insisted that the world just needed the right editor and the right newspaper. In 1841, he presented the Tribune and guaranteed that he had found both. Here it will There is a "higher newspaper" more suitable for "family firesides" than a Bowery pub, whose columns will not be omitted for "ridiculing infidelity and immorality", nor for "blasphemy, obscenity, A hideous mixture of profanity and obscenity." Instead of "intelligence," Greeley's concept of journalism was not only the carrier of news, but also of thought, literature, criticism, and reform.

This concept, A rough, thin-haired guy like this was an easy mark for Bennett, who took aim after a report on the New Jersey murders in Greeley. "Horace G," Bennett wrote. Lilley tearfully tried to show that publishing reports of trials, confessions and executions was extremely naughty. "No doubt he thought it was equally naughty of us to publish a paper." In Bennet's view, Greeley's self-righteous objections came from his rural roots: "Inspire a New England pumpkin and it will become as able an editor as Horace." "Greeley was simply not up to the job of urban journalism.

But Greeley was more savvy than Bennett imagined. It's true that he never quite escaped the rural dust, but that was who he was Your own choice.

Gree used Bennett's editorial performance as a foil to create his own newsmaker persona, casting himself as a newsprint version of a stock folk figure of the day: a wise national Yankee measuring change in a world. Bennett, the savvy urbanite, is the pioneer in telling the dark secrets of the city; Greeley, the country intellectual geek, is the forum railing against them.

Greeley's Tribune and the Greeley Tribune would rise together over the next 30 years, with the newspapers and the characters often indistinguishable. The Tribune will never have the newsgathering of Bennett's Herald, nor will it match the Herald's circulation in New York City. Instead, Greeley will use the city as a platform from which to project his editorial voice to, and to, the outside world. By the eve of the Civil War, the Tribune's subscribers had reached 250,000, and its readers in the northern United States had also increased a lot. Greeley was the most influential newspaper editor in the United States. By his own account, he was a "public teacher," an "oracle" on the Hudson who "exerted an irresistible influence on public opinion...created an emotional fraternity...and gave it A move in the right direction." That's the job of journalism.

The idea came to fruition among many readers of Forum Weekly. They thought of it like their own local weekly: written, posed, and printed by one person. Greeley, in their faith, produced every word. He did little to prevent this impression, even as the newspaper became a strikingly modern operation with a legion of editors, an army of positrons and printers, and massive steam-powered printing presses.

"No matter what the point of view or d