It was only with the stench of immiseration at his door that the cautious, risk-averse Day came up with a more practical way to rationalize the idea of a penny paper for the masses: What if he printed a flyer with news as an entertaining way to advertise his little printing shop? Thus was Day’s revolution—to make newspaper journalism accessible to the poor—devised not so much by luck or design as through sheer desperation.
It took him all day to print a thousand copies. In his exhaustion, Day misprinted the date of the first edition of The Sun. But finally, on September 3, 1833, there it was: the first edition of a paper that “shines for all” at a penny a day, The Sun. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising,” its editor declared.
Printing his paper was one thing, distributing and selling it was another; the whole scheme depended on getting The Sun into readers’ hands without demanding a lump sum upfront. Day, however, knew that amid the economic doldrums of the Jackson administration, thousands of men were unemployed—and he appealed directly to them: “TO THE UNEMPLOYED—A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again.” Perhaps to his surprise, Day’s first job-seeker was not an out-of-work laborer but a ten-year-old boy from Cork, Ireland, named Bernard Flaherty. He was hired, at two dollars for the week, to sell a hundred papers. Day’s scintillating headlines—“Double Distilled Villainy! Arrest of an Arch Villain! Horrid Transaction! Outrage on a Post Office”—ensured that Flaherty, and the host of urchins who soon followed him to Day’s door, sold out again and again. Along with the penny press, the newsboy was born.
The first edition carried stories about murders in Columbus, Ohio, and Charlottesville, Virginia, a fire in Rochester, New York, a young man who took laudanum after a lover broke his heart, a prison riot in Ohio, and deaths by consumption and cholera in New York and Mexico. Day was ahead of his time in realizing his readers’ taste for true crime and anticipating the newsroom adage of “if it bleeds, it leads.” But Day wanted an additional element: local news. Yes, he wanted news of crime—but that was local news for the working poor of the city. Before The Sun’s first week was out, Day had engaged an unemployed printer named George W. Wisner to stake out courts early every morning and write up the police reports for The Sun. Wisner, who came to be known as “the Balzac of the daybreak court,” would mix in serious news with scandal and crime and human interest, a brew so potent that he was ultimately imitated even by his detractors at the more serious papers.