The November 26, 1834 front page of The Sun |
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Editor | Benjamin Day (1833) |
| Founded | 1833 |
| Ceased publication | 1950 |
| Headquarters | New York City |
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 the New York Herald Tribune. The Sun was the most politically conservative of the three.
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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".[1] An evening edition was introduced in 1887. Frank Munsey bought both editions 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.[1] 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.
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.[2]
Today the paper 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.[3]
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."[4] (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.
The Sun's first female reporter was Emily Verdery Bettey, hired in 1868. Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd was hired as a reporter and fashion editor in the 1880s; she was one of the first women to become professional editors, and perhaps the first full-time fashion editor, in American newspaper history.
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.