[In the early 1830s], a brash young printer named Benjamin Day launched a bold economic experiment: the one-cent Sun. A veteran of New York’s printer’s row, Day had spent several years working as a compositor at the New-York Evening Post, where he met fellow compositor Dave Ramsey, who dreamed of starting an affordable daily newspaper. At the time, the standard price for a newspaper was six cents — roughly the cost of a pint of whiskey or a quarter-pound of bacon — and the most successful weekly newspapers reached a comparatively tiny sliver of the reading public, with an average circulation of around 1,200–1,700 per issue, mostly generated through subscriptions. Day saw the opportunity to reach a vastly bigger audience by taking his paper, literally, to the street.

Throughout 1831 and 1832, Day saved up to buy a set of type and a hand-crank press — just enough to take on job printing work of his own. As he grew his business, he started to devise a business plan, sketching out the contours of what a small, daily, one-cent paper might look like. Finally, on Monday, September 2, 1833, he published the first edition of The Sun on compact 11” × 16” sheets.

The first edition featured two tall tales — one about a dueling Irish captain, and another about a Vermont boy cursed with a permanent whistle — as well as advertisements, squibs, and assorted stories culled (copyright-free) from the sixpenny papers. From the outset, The Sun struck a far lighter tone than its contemporaries, with a healthy dose of fiction, humorous columns, and so-called humbugs — brief tidbits of editorial filler, intended to amuse or instruct — on its front page. The Sun pioneered a gritty new brand of reporting that moved beyond the traditional confines of business and politics to cover a greater swath of everyday life: “fires, theatrical performances, elephants escaping from the circus, women trampled by hogs,” and more. 

“We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others,” Day wrote. 

The paper focused heavily on crime, reporting on suicides, crimes of passion, public drunkenness, and scandal. The sixpenny editors took notice and published editorials condemning the rise of the “penny trash” and its “inutility and dangerous tendency” to pander to such base public appetites.

The Sun’s most enduring story proved to be an epic “humbug”: the infamous moon hoax, in which the paper reported an entirely fictional account of life discovered on the moon via a powerful new telescope owned by the (real) British astronomer Sir John Herschel, operating a fictitious observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. The stories describe a made-up lunar landscape of lush forests, herds of strange brown and blue quadrupeds, water birds, and four-foot-tall “man-bats” with huge, semi-transparent wings. These creatures engaged in all manner of odd behaviors that, as the paper delicately put it, “ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.” 

Over the course of a week, the paper ran five front-page articles chronicling the fantastic otherworldly sights that Sir John had supposedly captured through his telescope. The hoax caught on immediately, quickly picked up and reprinted in other newspapers via the exchange networks. This was Day’s plan all along. He and his reporter Richard Adams Locke had hoped to expose the complacency of traditional newspapers — demonstrating how readily they would seize on and republish a sensational story without vetting its source. The ploy worked. Most of the traditional press was outraged when they realized they had been duped and issued indignant condemnations.

But at least one notable reader rose to The Sun’s defense. Edgar Allan Poe thought it was a stroke of genius. “From the epoch of the hoax The Sun shone with unmitigated splendor,” he wrote, praising the story as “a triumph” and lauding “the penny system” as “one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress.”

The Sun never retracted the story.

The legacy of The Sun’s moon hoax endures today less for the particulars of its imaginary lunar creatures than for the speed and reach of its circulation. Reprinted again and again via the exchange networks, the story quickly acquired a patina of truth through the force of sheer repetition. Historians have since treated the episode as a cautionary tale — an early example of how news stories could go “viral” in print, and how commercial pressures can incentivize spectacle and sensationalism over careful, fact-based reporting.

The moon hoax also proved decisively that Day had found a winning formula. Circulation soared. The Sun had sold 300 copies on its first day; within a month, circulation climbed to 1200; within a year, it reached 10,000, and soon nearly doubled again. Day invested in a more powerful Napier two-cylinder press, later upgrading to one of the first Hoe steam-powered presses, and then a second one. With its potent mix of sensational coverage, mass market distribution model, and state-of-the-art printing infrastructure, The Sun became the most popular newspaper in the world — outstripping even The Times of London.

The legacy of The Sun’s moon hoax endures today less for the particulars of its imaginary lunar creatures than for the speed and reach of its circulation.

Emboldened by Day’s success, other publishers soon followed suit — notably, James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald pushed the boundaries of journalistic decorum even further, running stories of vice, corruption, innuendo, and withering attacks on public figures. He also frequently targeted The Sun, which he excoriated as “the impudent Sun — the unprincipled Sun — the mercenary Sun . . . that tells untruths for money … that cheats the whole city and country.” The Herald set the tone for an especially cynical and provocative brand of journalism — a clear precursor to the modern tabloid.

Within 15 months of its launch in 1835, Bennett’s Herald commanded a circulation of 40,000 — most of it driven by street sales hawked by newsboys, rather than subscriptions. Like Day, Bennett derided the blanket sheets as dull and plodding affairs, “the pine barrens of intelligence and taste.” He sought not just to inform but to entertain. But Bennett’s critics — and there were many — derided his meanspiritedness and seeming joy in attacking the personal character of his subjects, castigating the Herald as a “stigma on the city,” full of “vice and vulgar licentiousness[,] … hypocrisy, ignorance, and bloated conceit.” They condemned Bennett as a “half-crazy, un-educated wretch,” guilty of “immoral and blasphemous monstrosity.” Most of these attacks came from the sixpenny establishment papers, which saw Bennett as a mortal threat to their livelihoods. Several of their editors banded together in a so-called moral war against the Herald, publishing a torrent of editorials accusing Bennett of indecency, blasphemy, libel, and a host of other offenses. But as the outrage grew, so too did the Herald’s circulation.

The sixpenny papers’ attacks on Bennett stemmed not just from the perceived business threat but also from a deeper societal conflict. As these new urban papers emerged, attracting a broader swath of the reading public, the old guard newspapers — catering largely to the moneyed elite — found themselves party to a class conflict that put them, in the words of historian Michael Schudson, “on the defensive against a new way of being in the world.” The earlier generation of papers had emerged from an agrarian culture of “gentry rule” but were now contending with the pressures of a more democratic, market-driven urban culture. It would take the better part of the century for this conflict to play out, but the penny papers served as the first salvo in the making of a new, populist form of journalism for the masses.