When Giants Ruled The Story of Park Ro, NY's Great Nespaper Street [Hardcover]

When Giants Ruled takes the reader behind the scenes of a century of newspaper life. It relates how Benjamin Day, a job printer desperate for more money, started The Sun and inadvertently established the first successful daily for the masses. His main rival was James Gordon Bennett the Elder, whose innovations and success culminated in the most unusual war in journalism: an attempt by rival publishers to halt his efforts to revolutionize the press and to exterminate his Herald.

During the Civil War, with only Lincoln excluded, no person had greater sway upon the nations thinking than Horace Greeley. Venom spewed between Bennett and Greeley reached unprecedented heights until Charles Anderson Dana became overlord of Park Row and tangled with the crusading Joseph Pulitzer. Bennetts eccentric son did not wait for news to happen; he made it. The devastating circulation war between Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst reached a climax with the Spanish- American War. Hearsts sensationalism remained foremost with the masses until Joseph Patterson produced the most successful tabloid of the twentieth century. An epilogue connects the Park Row era to todays New York press.

During the heyday of New York journalism, most of the city's newspapers--New York Sun, New York Herald, New-York Tribune, The New York Times, New York World, The Graphic, etc.--had offices in the same part of downtown New York, a part known as Park Row. In his readable account of the 90-year period from Benjamin Day's Sun in the 1830s to the tabloids of the 1920s, Turner looks at a roster of giants that includes names familiar to every student of journalism history: Day, the Bennetts, Greeley, Raymond, Dana, Pulitzer, Hearst, Ochs, Brisbane, Munsey, Patterson, MacFadden. Only the New York Post, The New York Daily News, and The New York Times still publish in New York, none on Park Row. The stories of these men are already well known, having been recited in most traditional histories of nel³g