The Sun (newspaper)

“ Of course, that which has given persistent idiosyncrasy to a newspaper like the Sun, for example, is accumulated tradition. That which has made the whole count for more than the sum total of its parts, in the Sun’s case as in the case of its esteemed contemporaries, is the heritage of method and expedient, the increment of standardised skill and localised imagination contributed through many years to the fund of the paper by the forgotten worker as well as by the remembered. ”

“ The Sun was the pioneer. It was first issued, September 3, 1833, by Benjamin H. Day, an intelligent workingman, and a job printer by occupation. There had been several similar experiments during the preceding year, but they had all come to a speedy and untimely end. The Sun was the first penny newspaper that endured and it remained a penny sheet until 1861. It started with a circulation of 300. Its first issue contained twelve columns of matter, each column ten inches long. ”

“ It must not be inferred that the feature story, or any other kind of news story, should distort the facts. The writer in the Sun has merely attempted to reduce to the absurd the theory that journalism should put aside attractiveness in writing for a bare summary of facts. The modern newspaper, while its main purpose is still to inform, is coming more and more to be a source of101 entertainment also. It aims to instruct, but in such a manner that the reader will not be bored. ”

“ If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful; and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public or of any considerable part of it. ”

“ With Dana’s knowledge of what people wanted to read was mixed a curiosity, sometimes frankly expressed in the Sun, as to just why they wanted to read some things a great deal more than other things. It must be remembered that even in the seventies and eighties not everybody read a newspaper every day; some reserved their pennies and their eyes for great climaxes. The Sun, a paper which paid much attention to political matters, naturally found its circulation sharply affected by important political happenings. ”

“ It never harms the weak, or stoops to get news in a dishonourable or unbecoming way. It would be hard to devise a set of rules of newspaper ethics, but a few examples of things that the Sun doesn’t do may illuminate.
SELAH MERRILL CLARKE
Soon after one of the Sun’s most brilliant reporters had come on the paper, he was sent to report the wedding of a noted sporting man and a famous stage beauty,381 the marriage ceremony being performed by a picturesque Tammany alderman. The reporter returned to the office with a lot of amusing detail, which he recited in brief to the night city editor. ”

“ The Sun’s association with literature, particularly with fiction, has been more intimate than that of any other daily American newspaper. Ben Day had a taste for fiction, else the moon hoax, a bit of good writing as well as the greatest of fakes, would not have appeared. ”

“ I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. ”

“ Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail. ”

“ But here, probably for the first time in literature of this sort, we have a real biography of a newspaper itself, covering the whole range of its existence, exhibiting every function of its organism, illustrating every quality that has been conspicuous in the successive stages of its growth. The Sun is the hero of Mr. O’Brien’s “Story of the Sun.” The human participants figure in their incidental relation to the main thread of its life and activities. They do their parts, big or little, as they pass in interesting procession. ”

“ The manner of growth of the great newspaper’s well-defined and continuous character, distinguishing it from all the rest of the offspring of the printing press, a development sometimes not radically affected by changes of personnel, of ownership, of exterior conditions and fashions set by the popular taste, is a subject over which journalistic metaphysics might easily exert itself to the verge of boredom. ”

“ It was an enterprise that the public encouraged with avidity. The edition rapidly rose to one hundred and twenty thousand copies daily, and it is now rising; while the small margin of profit on that enormous circulation makes the Sun able to exist without paying any special301 attention to advertising—approaching very closely, in fact, to the condition of a daily newspaper able to support itself on the profits of its circulation alone. ”

“ The daily press is the great mirror of human events. When we open the paper at our breakfast table we find a literal record of the previous day's joy and sorrow—marriages and murders, failures and successes, news from afar and news from the next street—they all find a place. The would-be novel writer should be a diligent student of the newspaper. ”

“ It is my passion, my delight, my thought by day, and my dream by night to conduct The Herald, and to show the world and posterity, that a newspaper can be made the greatest, most fascinating, most powerful organ of civilization that genius ever yet dreamed of. ”

“ But I am chiefly conscious to-night of the debt of gratitude we all owe to the press. The newspaper—say what you will of it—is the immediate recorder and interpreter of life. Morning and evening it offers us that perpetual stimulus which makes the zest of living. Be your interests what they may, though you abstract your mind from the tumult of affairs and devote it to art or science, you cannot open a news [Pg 683] paper without the sensation of laying your hand upon the throbbing pulse of the world. ”

“ It is the biography of a Day. It is a photograph, of twenty-four hours' length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's newspapers, which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written, and we give them to the girl to light the fire. It is a strange fact that nobody prizes a newspaper for its abstract value until it is about a century out of date. It would seem that newspapers are like wine; the older they are, the more valuable. ”

“ Among the commonest and least comprehended ingredients of living is the daily newspaper. More powerful than public school or college, more vitally affecting destiny than all the churches of all the sects, it thrusts its well or ill conceived messages into the homes and minds of the millions. Coral like, it has reared itself into an all encircling reef, upon which beats the tidal wave of world politics or laps the insignificant ripple of village chatter. The roar of the tidal wave and the lap of the ripple are what men think they hear. ”

“ These printers and compositors were an intelligent body of men, seeking always to benefit their condition and studiously alive to the new ideas with which the country was then teeming.
With the founding of the New York Sun, we come to consider the history of great popular institutions. Older newspapers came to have something of the same influence as the Sun, notably the Evening Post, under Bryant and later under Godkin. But the Sun was the first popular paper; its story, as Mr. Edward P. Mitchell
has said, is that of a living thing, altogether aside from the men who made it. ”

“ Thousands seldom listen to a clergyman. But in these wide-awake days everybody of any account must read the newspaper, for the reading of the newspaper has come to be absolutely essential to the daily routine of every intelligent person. The things we read in the morning newspaper are the things we talk about during the day. If you are interested in politics, or if you are interested in finance, or the fluctuations of prices, or the movements of society, or any phase of trade or commerce, or in any of the vital questions of the hour—for all of these you turn to the newspaper. ”

“ How did the Sun reporters of the seventies compare with those of later years? As no two reporters are alike in vision and style, no two occasions identical in incident, no two dramatic moments twin, it is better to make comparison by choosing arbitrarily scenes far apart in years, but set on similar stages, and to lay before the reader the work of the Sun reporter in each case. ”

“ A newspaper is an instrument of great importance; all men read it; many read nothing else; some it serves as reason and conscience too: in lack of better, why not? It speaks to thousands every day on matters of great moment—on matters of morals, of politics, of finance. It relates daily the occurrences of our land, and of all the world. All men are affected by it; hindered or helped. To many a man his morning paper represents more reality than his morning prayer. ”

“ Now, the journalist who is engaged on a daily paper has to turn the day upside down. He is generally starting to his work when ordinary folk are enjoying their hours of ease. Like the baker, he sallies forth to his factory when the lamps are glimmering; for the newspaper must accompany the morning roll ”

“ Oh, the newspapers exaggerate dreadfully—shamefully, to get up a sensation in the interest of their own flimsy sheets. There is some disturbance, but nothing like what people are made believe by the newspaper reports. ”

“ The curious effect on American journalism of the conflict between Sun methods and the so-called new journalism was referred to, in an address delivered at Yale University on January 12, 1903, by Frank A. Munsey, then owner of the New York Daily News and now proprietor of the Sun:
The newspaperman of to-day is a composite type, the product of the Sun and the New York World of fifteen or eighteen years ago. ”

“ That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing is to propose practical improvements for it. ”

“ We are not yet educated to that spirit of appreciation we should possess for those who are struggling to perfect themselves in journalism. The great mass of our people do not look upon our Press as educators, or even truthful reporters or delineators of the live issues of the day. Most of our papers are issued weekly, generally containing news read in the daily Press, and many things are found in them foreign to a well-conducted newspaper, which some denominate gossip; and again, there is a demand for light reading matter to the exclusion of all other. ”

“ Perhaps the tendency of modern journalism is to epitomize too much. In the hurry of daily newspaper work and the press of matter upon our pages, very likely we are fatally brief, and sacrifice rhetorical beauty to naked and goose-pimply facts. ”

“ Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspapers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the working-classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success.” In other letters he says: “The reputation of the writings of any man, the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slightest degree serve, any daily newspaper.” ”

“ And all these touches of nature make us wondrous kind. It is the country newspaper, bringing together daily the threads of the town's life, weaving them into something rich and strange, and setting the pattern as it weaves, directing the loom, and giving the cloth its color by mixing the lives of all the people in its color-pot—it is this country newspaper that reveals us to ourselves, that keeps our country hearts quick and our country minds open and our country faith strong. ”

“ One of the most important of the world’s industries carried on at night is the making of the great morning daily newspaper. The average reader who unfolds his paper above his coffee cup in the morning rarely reflects that it represents the labor of half a hundred men, a great number of whom bend their lagging steps homeward only when the newsboy has begun to wake the morning echoes with his familiar cry. ”

“ The reporter who told me the story which I have just recorded, was an excellent specimen of the class—shrewd, a capital judge of character, and a good organiser. He had, however, never got beyond the stereotyped phrases which appear in every newspaper—indeed, there was no need for him to get beyond them. Every death “cast a gloom” over the locality where it occurred; and a chronicle of the weather at any time during the month of March caused him to let loose the journalist’s lion upon an unsuspecting public. ”

“ Let us endeavour to supply a rapid sketch of the wonderful organization that is required to produce this great necessary of modern society.
The essential characteristic of a newspaper is news. It may be philosophical, or critical, or imaginative—it may pour forth treasures of learning or eloquence, to live but a few hours and then be too readily forgotten—but no amount of ability will give it currency if it be deficient in news. ”