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From Penny Press to Protocols
In 1833, Benjamin Day had a crazy idea. What if newspapers didn’t have to cost six cents? What if you could sell them for just one penny and make up the difference somewhere else?
This sounds obvious now, but at the time it was radical. Newspapers were expensive because they were written for expensive people — merchants, politicians, the educated elite who could afford six cents and cared about shipping reports and political speeches. Day’s New York Sun aimed lower. It featured crime stories, human interest pieces, and local gossip. It was sensational, accessible, and cheap.
The penny press, as historians call it, worked because Day figured out something that seems simple in retrospect: if you make your product accessible to everyone instead of just the wealthy, you can make money by selling something else entirely. In this case, attention. Advertisers would pay to reach all those penny-spending readers who couldn’t afford the six-cent papers but might buy soap or patent medicine.
For thirty years, this model dominated American journalism. Newspapers multiplied, circulation exploded, and a genuinely democratic press emerged. Publishers competed to create the most engaging content because engagement directly translated to revenue. The better your stories, the more readers you attracted. The more readers you attracted, the more advertisers…