From Penny Press to Watchdog Press

On September 3, 1833, Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun at one cent an issue, a fraction of what rival papers charged, and sold it on the street rather than only by subscription. Its success launched the penny press, a wave of cheap newspapers that reached a working class readership the older subscription papers had largely ignored.

The Hungarian born publisher built the New York World into the model of the modern mass circulation newspaper, mixing crusading investigations with illustrations, sports pages and stunt journalism. His fortune later endowed the Pulitzer Prizes and the Columbia journalism school that still carry his name.

Named for the Yellow Kid comic strip that Pulitzer's World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal both ran as a weapon in their 1895 to 1898 circulation war, yellow journalism favored scare headlines and jingoistic coverage over verified fact. It shows what the penny press's competition for readers could become at its worst.

Writing for Pulitzer's World, Nellie Bly feigned insanity to get committed to a New York asylum and exposed its conditions in her 1887 report Ten Days in a Mad House, then in 1889 and 1890 raced around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional record from Jules Verne's novel. Her undercover reporting showed a mass circulation paper could pursue a real public interest story, not only a sensational one.

Founded in 1846 when New York newspapers pooled the cost of covering the Mexican War, the Associated Press is owned by its member outlets rather than shareholders. Its plain, sourced wire style became the baseline voice of American news reporting, feeding the same newspapers this trail has followed.

Paul Julius Reuter founded the agency in London in 1851, after once using carrier pigeons to bridge a gap in the telegraph line, to sell fast factual dispatches to newspapers everywhere. Alongside the Associated Press, Reuters helped invent the wire service model the daily press still runs on.

Founded in 1851 as a deliberate answer to the sensationalism papers like Pulitzer's and Hearst's practiced, the New York Times built its reputation on sober, factual reporting under the promise all the news that is fit to print, and grew into one of the country's newspapers of record.

A Washington, D.C. daily founded in 1877, the Post is best known for its investigative reporting on the 1972 Watergate break in, led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein under editor Barry Sussman, coverage that at first drew little attention from rival papers including the Times.

The Post's sustained coverage of the June 1972 break in at the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices traced the burglary to the Nixon White House and helped expose the cover up that led to Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, though Woodward himself has called the popular myth of two reporters single handedly bringing down a president absurd. It closes this trail as the penny press's descendant, turning its investigative power on the government itself.