In 1833, Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun, a mass-produced daily newspaper that he sold for a penny a copy, which almost anyone could afford. Soon Day was selling fifteen thousand papers a day and making his money back on volume. Others saw him getting rich and jumped into the action. Papers that sold for a penny sprang up like mushrooms. Readers of these papers lived rough lives, they weren’t deep intellectuals of the leisure classes, so publishers filled their pages with news of murders, fires, suicides, and other sensational events.
