Happy Birthday, New York Times. September 18, 1851

[David Lockmiller]

Happy birthday to us. The New York Times. September 18, 2018

Then called The New-York Daily Times, the paper was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones.

The first edition cost one penny and lacked any imagery or color.

The founders declared that the newspaper would be issued every morning but Sunday, “for an indefinite number of years to come.” (Ten years later, The Times was among several papers that started Sunday editions to accommodate demand for news of the Civil War.)

During a time when sensationalist journalism was commonplace in media, The Times vowed to avoid such tactics in favor of neutral, fact-based reporting.
“We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong,” Mr. Raymond said in the introductory article of the paper’s first edition. “What is good we desire to preserve and improve; what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.”

Throughout the years, the paper would shorten its name to The New-York Times and eventually drop the hyphen in favor of its current style.