The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918O'Brien, Frank Michael
History
The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918
O'Brien, Frank Michael
Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833)
In keeping news down to the bone Wood was of remarkable value to the
_Sun_ in those years when Dana showed that it was possible to tell
everything in four pages. New York was smaller then, and display
advertising had not come to be a science. The _Sun_ got along nicely on
its circulation, for the newsdealers paid one and one-third cents for
each copy. With the circulation receipts about fourteen hundred dollars
a day, the advertising receipts were clear profit. Amos Cummings had
such a fierce disregard for the feelings of advertisers that often,
when a good piece of news came in late, he would throw out advertising
to make room for it.
The city editors of the _Sun_ under Cummings were, in order, John
Williams, Lawrence S. Kane, Walter M. Rosebault, William Young, and
John B. Bogart. Williams, who had been a Methodist preacher, left the
_Sun_ in 1869 to become religious editor of the _Herald_. Kane, a big
blond Irishman with mutton-chop whiskers, held the city desk until the
summer of 1870 and then returned to the reportorial staff. Rosebault,
who had been one of the _Sun’s_ best young reporters, resigned from the
city editorship late in 1870 in order to study law. He afterward went
to San Francisco to be principal editorial writer of the _Chronicle_,
but soon returned to New York and for many years, while practising
law, he contributed editorial and special articles to the _Sun_. Mr.
Rosebault, who is still an active lawyer, told the present writer, in
July, 1918, that of all the reporters who served on his staff when
he was city editor of the _Sun_ only one, Sidney Rosenfeld, later a
dramatist and the first editor of _Puck_, was still alive.
The first telegraph editor of the _Sun_ was an Episcopalian clergyman,
Arthur Beckwith, afterward connected with the Brooklyn _Eagle_ and the
Brooklyn _Citizen_ as a law reporter. When he left the telegraph desk
of the _Sun_ his place was taken by Colonel Henry Grenville Shaw, a
Civil War veteran. Colonel Shaw left the _Sun_ to become night editor
of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ and was succeeded by Amos B. Stillman,
a ninety-pound man from Connecticut. He was a newspaperman in his
native state until the Civil War, and after Appomattox he went back
to Connecticut. He went on the _Sun_ in 1870 as telegraph editor, and
stayed on the same desk for forty-five years.
In the early days of Dana’s _Sun_ there were no night editors, for
it had not been found necessary to establish a central desk where
all the news of all the departments could be gathered together for
judgment as to relative value. Each desk man sent his own copy to the
composing-room, and the pages were made up by the managing editor or
the night city editor after midnight. Leisurely nights, those, with
no newspaper trains to catch and no starting of the presses until four
o’clock in the morning!
[Illustration:
AMOS JAY CUMMINGS
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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