— Ch. 1 · Foundations And Early Rivals —
New York Herald Tribune.
~8 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
On the 6th of May 1835, James Gordon Bennett, a Scottish immigrant aged twenty-four, launched the New York Herald from a small office in Manhattan. He had previously written dispatches for the New York Enquirer that sharply criticized President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay. Bennett called the legal restrictions on press coverage an old worm-eaten Gothic dogma of the Court while reporting on a murder trial in 1830. His paper carried the most authentic list of market prices published anywhere, which commanded attention in financial circles alone. The Herald also became known for its crime reporting after covering the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett with excerpts from the victim's correspondence. This approach made Bennett the best known if not most notorious journalist in the country at that time. By 1839, the Heralds circulation exceeded that of The London Times. During the Mexican-American War starting in 1846, the Herald assigned a reporter to the conflict as the only newspaper in New York to do so. It used the telegraph to beat competitors with news and provided Washington policymakers with the first reports from the field. In 1841, Horace Greeley founded the New-York Tribune on April 10 as a daily penny newspaper for Whig Party constituents. Unlike the Herald or the Sun, it generally shied away from graphic crime coverage. Greeley saw his newspaper as having a moral mission to uplift society through editorials described as weapons in a ceaseless war to improve society. The Weekly Tribune reached a circulation of fifty thousand within ten years outpacing the Heralds weekly edition. The Tribune ranks included Henry Raymond who later founded The New York Times and Charles Dana who edited The Sun for nearly three decades.
The Great Merger Of 1924
Frank Munsey approached Elisabeth Mills Reid in early 1924 with a proposal to purchase the Tribune and merge it with the Herald. The elder Reid refused to sell saying only that she would buy the Herald instead. The two sides negotiated through the winter and spring until the 17th of March 1924 when Munsey agreed to an offer of five million dollars for the Herald and the Paris Herald. The merged paper published its first edition on March 19 under the name New York Herald New York Tribune. On the 31st of May 1926, the more familiar name New York Herald Tribune was substituted. Apart from the Heralds radio magazine and weather listings, the merged paper was with very few changes the Tribune intact. Only twenty-five Herald reporters were hired after the merger while six hundred people lost their jobs. Within a year, the new paper's circulation reached two hundred seventy-five thousand. Helen Rogers Reid took charge of the advertising department in 1919 and reorganized the faltering operation. Her aggressive pursuit of advertisers selling them on the wealth position and power of the Tribunes readership caused annual revenues to jump from one point seven million dollars to four point three million within her first two years. Circulation was responsible for no more than ten percent of that increase. The move surprised the journalism community which had expected Munsey to purchase the Tribune. One reporter reading the bulletin board note remarked Jonah just swallowed the whale.