PATENT BENDING.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 14-JUL-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The American newspaper business as we know it was born on September 3, 1833, when a twenty-three-year-old publisher named Benjamin Day put out the first edition of the New York Sun. Whereas other papers sold for five or six cents, the Sun cost just a penny. For revenue, Day relied on advertising rather than on subscriptions. Above all, he revolutionized the way papers were distributed. He sold them to newsboys in lots of a hundred to hawk in the street. Before long, Day was the most important publisher in New York.

One thing that Day did not do was patent any of these innovations. Soon after the Sun appeared, penny papers made their debut in Boston and Baltimore; in New York, James Gordon Bennett started the Herald, mimicking the Sun's price and sales methods. By 1840,...

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