Precursor to Modern Media Hype: The 1830s Penny Press

Abstract

The expansion of television through a proliferation of channels on cable, the advent and popularity of talk radio, and the entry of major media companies and new upstarts on the Internet at the beginning of the twenty-first century heightened awareness of the necessary scramble for audience by these medra entities. Indeed, the almost simultaneous expansion of these media channels has produced a frenzy of marketing ploys and a backlash of criticism about the excesses of these new undertakings, and objections to their blandness while they sought the lowest common denominator. One might conclude that this convergence constituted a rather unique period in US media development, but in reality, it shared many similarities with the creation and expansion of the first mass medium, the Penny Press, 170 years earlier. When, in the 1830s, Benjamin Day and other newspaper publishers transformed the daily newspaper from a narrowly focused and sparsely distributed publication to a broad-based, massproduced medium, societal changes were in place to enable this new medium to flourish just as they were with the advent of new media in the last half of the twentieth century. Technological developments, common interests among the potential audience, and literacy in the case of newspapers and lersure trme in the case of television made these media changes possible. But, just as electronic media companies sell their media channels through hyperbolic communication, Day and his cohorts did so as well, especially in New York City and other East Coast cities. An analysis of the first two years of The Sun in New York shows that Day demonstrated a range of product creation and marketing concepts long before these concepts had names: critical mass, tipping points, product differentiation, barriers to entry, building communities, and, of course, interactivity. Day's medium generated controversy that resembled new media figures of the twentyfirst century: Matt Drudge and the complaints about inappropriate forms of journalism; Bill Gates and predatory pricing; Steve case and pervasive branding. As television, radio, and Internet companies would discover 150 years later, Day faced problems with convincing an audience that the new medium was worth the expense or time, with plagiarism of content and ideas, and with demonstrating the difference between his news product and that of the competition. In addition, Day was always on the bleeding edge of a new media technology that was at times as uncooperative as the broken Window of a desktop PC. This analysis uses the theoretical perspective of social construction of technology (SCOT) as developed by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, and later refined by other historians of technology. SCOT suggests that in any technological development, a number of technological alternatives exist, and over time, relevant social groups agree on the purpose, meaning, and physical form of the evolving technology by selecting and rejecting various options through dialogue and negotiation. The relevant social group may be a subset of a broader group (New York newspaper readers versus all US readers), and the influence may be a function of which decisions were made first, a process called path dependence by historians of economics and technology. The dialogue between Day and his audience obviously cannot be directly reconstructed, but the interaction can be inferred from the communications of Day with his readers and his occasional responses to their comments via The Sun (Bijker; Bijker and Pinch; Bij ker, Hughes, and Pinch; Garud and Karnoe; Pinch; David, Clio and the Economics of Qwerty; David, Path Dependence). The Beginning of the First Mass Medium In 1833, New York was already the largest city in the United States with 220,000 residents. However, a business depression had hit; the city was still suffering from a cholera epidemic that had killed 3,500 in the previous year; and the job-printing shop of twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Day was near collapse. …