The Last Trace of a Great Newspaper

The Last Trace of a Great Newspaper

James Gordon Bennett Sr. founded the New York Herald in 1835 and made it the first modern newspaper. The New York Times' renaming the International Herald Tribune in the fall marks the disappearance of the name of the New York Herald from American journalism after 178 years

Since 2003, the New York Times has been the sole owner of the International Herald Tribune, which was founded in 1887 by James Gordon Bennett Jr., with headquarters in Paris. The Times has announced that it will be renaming the paper as the International New York Times this fall.

While that will mean the loss of a masthead familiar to Americans traveling abroad for more than four generations, it also means the final disappearance of the name of the New York Herald from American journalism after 178 years. That is a pity, for the New York Herald was the greatest newspaper of its day and has a claim to have been the greatest newspaper ever. Its founder, James Gordon Bennett Sr., created modern journalism.

Born in Scotland, Bennett emigrated to the United States in 1819 at the age of 24. Gangly, stoop-shouldered and cross-eyed, Bennett was not a handsome man. He also lacked social graces or any ability whatever to suffer fools. Even simple tact was beyond him.

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Library of Congress
James Gordon Bennett Sr. founded the New York Herald in 1835 and made it the first modern newspaper.
Bennett was always a man alone. This made him a great journalist, but he paid a terrible personal price, never knowing real friendship.

Unable to get along with the editor of the New York Enquirer, Bennett suggested he go to Washington and report directly from there. This was a revolutionary idea at the time. Previously, newspapers had reported out-of-town news by simply copying the articles of other newspapers. The editor agreed, happy to be rid of his bumptious but talented employee. Bennett became the first Washington correspondent.

He spent several years working for various papers and slowly conceiving of a new kind of journalism. Newspapers had begun in the 17th century, but they had always been either trade papers, reporting on one sort of news, such as shipping or financial, or they were political, supporting one party or another. The political papers were editorial pages wrapped in a little tendentious news.

WHEN BENNETT FOUNDED THE New York Herald in 1835, with an office in a cellar, a desk consisting of two barrels and a couple of boards, and capital of $500, he had a new idea in mind. Instead of telling readers what he thought they should know, as editors had done in the past, he would tell them what he thought the readers wanted to know: information about the world beyond their immediate ken.

Bennett adapted many ideas first used by other journalists. But he assembled them into a new whole: a politically independent, mass-circulation newspaper full of up-to-the-minute news on all subjects likely to be of interest to his readership. It was, he told his first biographer, "my thought by day, and my dream by night to conduct the Herald and to show the world and posterity that a newspaper can be made the most fascinating, most powerful organ of civilization that genius ever dreamed of."