Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

22 With Amusement for Allthe historian Isabelle Lehuu, and creating a virtual “carnival on the page”that was cheap, playful, and sensational. This print transformation owedmuch to changing technology, popular demand, the instincts of creativenewspaper pioneers such as Benjamin Day and James Gordon Bennett, andan economic moment that allowed artisan printers with working-class sympathiesto enter the mass circulation field. Quickly, it began to turn upsidedown the traditional print business, challenging what had, in effect, been aproduct of and for the nation’s elite. And it marked a major journalisticturn toward entertainment. 36Going into the 1830s, newspapers typically depended financially onpolitical parties or government contracts and sold for six cents, a price thatsubstantially limited the readership. Because of their size—sometimes twoby three feet per page—they were known as “blanket sheets.” Copies wereseldom available on the streets and were the province of wealthy subscribers,particularly commercial and professional men. For rank-and-file citizens,newspapers were, thus, for the most part inaccessible and, in anycase, addressed primarily the concerns and interests of people who enjoyedmoney, power, and influence. 37On September 3, 1833, Benjamin Day, a shrewd former printing pressoperator who had already aligned himself with a failed effort to publish amass circulation paper that would convey “the distress which pervades theproducing classes of this community,” broke dramatically from the genteelnewspaper business by starting a new and quite different daily paper, theNew York Sun. The Sun sold for only one cent, was small in size (nine bytwelve inches), received no financial support from political parties or government,and depended entirely on street sales and advertising. Withinthree months, a circulation of five thousand copies made the Sun the mostpopular paper in New York City. Two years later, circulation figures approachedtwenty thousand. The relatively low costs of entering the businessfacilitated Day’s ventures and, soon, those of other penny pioneers—such as Arunah Shepherdson Abell and William Swain, who both workedfor the Sun before starting the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and JamesGordon Bennett, who with only $500 launched the New York Herald.“Capital! Bless you,” Day recalled, “I hadn’t any capital.” What he hadwere his contacts with printers and a willingness to try out developing technologies.Day initially relied on a hand-cranked flatbed printer that producedonly two hundred copies an hour. Within a short time, he hadaccelerated the output to two thousand copies an hour by using a rotatingcylinder to move the paper across the form. In 1835, he implemented asteam-driven process with two cylinders, more than doubling the numberof sheets per hour from two to five thousand. By 1840, that figure hadjumped to an astounding forty thousand. Day actively courted a wide read-