Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/282

256 The New York Herald was the first successful attempt to provide a paper that dealt with the doings of the people aside from their activities as political communities; it was also the first newspaper to introduce what have since been described as "counting-room "methods. It was the first to sell news as news and not for the effect it would have on its readers. The founder's experiences in politics had been bitter enough to make him sympathize with the great mass of people who had very little more to do with government than to vote. Out of his own personal disappointments there had come the realization that there was a vast majority of the public for whom what usually passed for news could have but little interest, except as it stirred their imagination. For the average men on the street, news as printed in the current journals had the same interest that the cheap love story of a later generation had for the maid-of-all-work, who found therein an opportunity to throb over the misfortunes and adventures of titled persons, a belief in whose existence constituted one of the joys and opiates of her existence.

Bennett had in mind a paper for those who were unimportant, an entirely novel idea at that time—that it should be politically independent was not absolutely necessary, but this was a quicker way of achieving his goal. He was the first to aspire to build an institution that would be responsive to him and that would propagate the principles he believed in. Twenty years earlier this would not have been possible, for, twenty years earlier, the people to whom he was to appeal had not the vote, nor was there the interest in general education that made possible, among the great unknown mass, a large circulation.

The New York Herald was in the direct line of the development of American journalism, and its founder is, for the student of modern journalism, a most interest