Institutions & Titans

James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald

James Gordon Bennett

By Savannah Williams

When James Gordon Bennett started the New York Herald on May 6, 1835, he had just $500 and worked out of a basement office. Nobody could have guessed this Scottish immigrant would completely change American journalism and make innovations we still use today.

Bennett didn't invent the penny press. Benjamin Day's New York Sun had already been around for two years but Bennett took the idea and ran with it. He figured out how to combine cheap, accessible newspapers with the kind of serious coverage you'd only find in expensive elite papers. The result was what scholars call the "prototype of modern journalism". His success was amazing. In just a few months, the Herald was outselling its competitors. By 1860, it had 60,000 readers daily, making it the biggest newspaper in America. During the Civil War, circulation shot up to 400,000, which was many times more than all American newspapers combined had just fifty years earlier. The Herald kept going strong for almost 90 years before merging with the New York Tribune in 1924. The Herald Tribune lasted until 1966 which makes 131 years total, this shows just how great Bennett's business model really was.

A town looking at Civil War news

Here's where things get interesting. Bennett's success came with a very serious moral cost. He was an unapologetic white supremacist who used the Herald to defend slavery, trash abolitionists, and fight against Lincoln's efforts to save the Union. During the 1860 election, he tried to scare white workers by warning them that if Lincoln won, they'd have to compete with "four million emancipated Negroes" for jobs. The Herald backed an anti-war rally in June 1863, and Bennett spent years pumping out inflammatory content that helped set the stage for the deadly Draft Riots that July. But the most telling moment came when a mob showed up at his office during those riots. Bennett flipped overnight from defending slavery to supporting emancipation. 

Just like that. 

As one newspaper wrote after he died, Bennett had no real principles. He just gave people whatever they wanted to read, whether it was racism or reform.

People reading the newspaper in front of a newspaper stand

With that being said Bennett's contributions to journalism are hard to ignore. He invented the newspaper interview. His first one was during the Helen Jewett murder case in 1836, and he later conducted the first ever presidential interview with Martin Van Buren, the eight president of the United States in 1839. He also pioneered on-scene reporting by sending reporters directly to crime scenes instead of just relying on official documents. This completely changed how journalists gathered news. Bennett hired foreign correspondents in London, Paris, and Rome to get international stories firsthand. He was the first editor to regularly cover sports because he understood people cared about games and competition. I would say most importantly, he created specialized sections by splitting up finance, sports, local news, national news, and international coverage. If you open any newspaper today and you'll see that same structure.

Bennett's story is a reminder that brilliant innovators can also be unmoral people. He made news accessible to everyone while using that same power to spread racism. Modern journalism was able to separate this and take his techniques and innovations to shape newspapers as we know them today. 

AI usage disclaimer. I used Claude to write and organize this post based on my slides and note cards that I presented in class. I found the information for my slides and note cards also using Claude. I found my own pictures and edited the post to have more of my writing style.