Background
Day was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on April 10, 1810 to Henry Day, a hatter, and Mary Ely.
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Benjamin Day
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Day started his printing career in 1824, at the Springfield Republican. Day"s Sun was responsible for the story of Richard Adams Locke published in 1835 in which he wrote a story about life on the moon that was fictional, but was received by the general public as fact. The publicity of the article was widespread at that time and now is referred to as "The Great Moon Hoax".
He is credited with stretching the truth that came to be known as Sensationalism.
Day is also credited for importing to the United States the London Plan, a largely antiquated system today of newspaper distribution in which the paper carriers buy newspapers in bulk from the publisher and sell the papers to the reading public for a profit. Afterwards he started the True Sun in 1840, which had but a brief run.
In 1842, he created the Brother Jonathan, the first illustrated weekly in the United States., which he ran for twenty years. Day constantly quarreled with George Wisner over the publication of abolitionist articles
Day considered himself democratic to Wisner"s extreme abolitionist standpoint.
From The New Yorker:
The American newspaper business as we know it was born on September 3, 1833, when a twenty-three-year-old publisher named Benjamin Day put out the first edition of the New York Sun. Whereas other papers sold for five or six cents, the Sun cost just a penny. Foreign revenue, Day relied on advertising rather than on subscriptions.
Above all, he revolutionized the way papers were distributed.
He sold them to newsboys in lots of a hundred to hawk in the street. Before long, Day was the most important publisher in New New York
