The Sun (New York City)

The Sun

The November 26, 1834 front page of The Sun
Type	Daily newspaper
Editor	Benjamin Day (1833)
Founded	1833
Headquarters	New York City

For the modern newspaper of the same name, see The New York Sun.

The Sun was a New York newspaper that was published from 1833 until 1950. It was considered a serious paper, like the city's two more successful broadsheets, the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. The Sun was the most politically conservative of the three.

History

In New York, The Sun began publication September 3, 1833, as a morning newspaper edited by Benjamin Day with the slogan "It Shines for All". An evening edition was introduced in 1887. Frank Munsey bought the two papers in 1916 and merged the Evening Sun with his New York Press. The morning edition of The Sun was merged for a time with Munsey's New York Herald as The Sun and New York Herald, but in 1920 Munsey separated them again, killed The Evening Sun and moved The Sun to an evening format. This paper continued until January 4, 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram to form a new paper called the New York World-Telegram and Sun; in 1966, this paper became part of the New York World Journal Tribune, which folded the following year.

During 2002, a new newspaper was launched in New York with the same name but no other association with the original Sun.

Significant articles

The Sun first became famous for its central role in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. On April 13, 1844, The Sun published "The Balloon-Hoax" by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax about an alleged Atlantic crossing by balloon. Today it is best known for the 1897 editorial "Is There a Santa Claus?" (commonly referred to as "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus"), written by Francis Pharcellus Church. John B. Bogart, city editor of The Sun between 1873 and 1890, made what is perhaps the most frequently quoted definition of the journalistic endeavor: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." (The quotation is frequently attributed to Charles Dana, Sun editor and part-owner between 1868 and 1897.) In 1947–48, the Sun featured a groundbreaking series of articles by Malcolm Johnson, "Crime on the Waterfront," that won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 1949. The series served as the basis for the 1954 movie On the Waterfront. In the year 1868 the New York Sun hired their first female reporter by the name of Emily Verdery Bettey. The Sun hired Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd as a reporter and fashion editor in the 1880s; she was one of the first professional female editors, and perhaps the first full-time fashion editor, of any American newspaper.

Legacy

The masthead of the original Sun is visible in a montage of newspaper clippings in a scene of the 1972 film The Godfather. The newspaper's offices, a converted department store at 280 Broadway, between Chambers and Reade Streets in lower Manhattan now known as "The Sun Building" and famous for the clocks that bear the newspaper's masthead and motto was recognized as a NYC landmark in 1986. In 2002 a new broadsheet styled The New York Sun and bearing the old newspaper's masthead and motto was launched as a "conservative alternative" and local-news focused alternative to the New York Times and other New York newspapers. It ceased publication on September 30, 2008.

See also

• Moses Yale Beach, an early owner of The Sun.
• List of defunct American periodicals

Further reading

• Gentleman of the Press: The Life and Times of an Early Reporter, Julian Ralph of the Sun. Lancaster , Paul. Syracuse University Press; 1992.