David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Did printing presses get way cheaper, too? Yes. It got a lot cheaper to print newspapers. It must have in various forms of machinery, all rudimentary automation. And just the demand. The growing population, the demand for news, literacy. It was like the Substacks of 1851. Everybody was starting a newspaper. Also because of the advances in production technology, not only could you make more newspapers and people could start them, but you could sell them cheaper. Before this time, newspapers were selling (I think) around 5–6¢ a copy, but starting in the 1850s, newspapers—in particular, new newspapers—dropped in price to 1¢ per copy. This is going to come back later. You could reach a whole new mass market. Here we are in September of that year of 1851, the well-known New York journalist and politician, Henry Jarvis Raymond, and his friend and former banker and merchant, George Jones, embark on a new newspaper venture in this brave new landscape and they published the first edition on September 18th, 1851 of The New-York Daily Times. Who were these guys? Jones, as we said, was a former banker. He had also, though, worked as a business manager at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, which was then the premier paper in New York, and that was where he had met Raymond. Jones had family money and lots of connections about town from his wife's family. Do you know his wife's father's name, Ben? You're not going to get this but I had to put it in here. His wife's father's—no, I've no idea.…

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