Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/224

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.



made on April 29, 1836, when The Ladies 1 Morning Star, price one cent, appeared above the newspaper horizon. A brief mention of all the newspapers which started in New York from 1830 to 1870 would fill a page of this volume and would make about as interesting reading as the catalogue of ships in Homer's "Iliad."

POPULARITY OF TRANSCRIPTS

For some reason The Transcript was an unusually popular name for these early penny papers, just as The Gazette had been for the early weeklies of the Colonial Period and The Adver- tiser had been for the first dailies of the Early Republic. Mention has already been made of The Transcript of Boston and New York; reference to The Transcript of Philadelphia will be made a little later. The first penny paper in Albany was The Tran- script, started on October 12, 1835. Baltimore saw The Daily Transcript, a penny paper established on May 10, 1836. On May 17, 1837, The Sun was started at Baltimore under the edi- torship of Arunah S. Abell. Abell was present when The Sun first rose in New York and had helped make the first entry of The Public Ledger in Philadelphia. Within a year Abell's penny paper had a circulation of "more than twice as many copies as the oldest established journal" in that city. In 1842 The Daily Whig and The National Forum were established in Baltimore as penny papers to support Henry Clay in his presidential aspira- tions.

PENNY PRESS IN BOSTON

The success of The Sun in New York and that of its satellite, The Orb, in Philadelphia led to the establishment of The 12 o'clock News in Boston on March 13, 1834. Strictly speaking, the first newspaper to be sold in Boston for one cent was The Daily Penny Post which was first set up at 28 Franklin Street on Monday, August 26, 1833, with a motto of Multum in Parvo. The News, published by B. Hammatt Norton, was issued daily at twelve o'clock and after the second number appeared on March 17 the paper was printed regularly. At the start The News was similar to The Sun of New York, not only in