The Sun, the Moon, and the Press

The esteemed publisher of the Sun ventured into the editorial galley the other day and asked about the prospects for a squib on the 189th birthday of the Sun, which first rolled off the presses on September 3, 1833. “How about,” we offered, “something on the great moon hoax.” The publisher stared off into the distance and rubbed his hands together, as his brain began calculating the potential impact on circulation.Circulation, it’s claimed, was the whole point about what the other papers call the Great Moon Hoax. It was, they insisted, a circulation stunt. It’s true that when, in 1835, the moon story began running in the Sun, the press in New York could have used a boost. There were 250,000 residents in the city and 11 newspapers. Yet they boasted a combined circulation of but 26,500. In other words, nothing about which to write home.At the time, a newspaper typically cost six cents, as was noted by the current editor of the Sun in a review in the Wall Street Journal of Mattthew Goodman’s lively history, “The Sun and the Moon.” The Sun wanted a mass audience and launched with a price of one cent, announcing the “penny press.” That, alone, failed to do the trick. Two years later, the proprietor, Benjamin Day, brought in a British editor, Richard Adams Locke.It was under Locke that the Sun began the series of articles about how a scientist in South Africa, peering through a new kind of telescope, spied on the lunar surface a herd of quadrupeds, a blueish, goat-sized monster, and “four flocks of large winged creatures … descending in a slow, even motion from the cliffs to the plain, where they landed and, their wings disappearing behind them, began walking, erect and dignified, toward a nearby forest.”Thousands of New Yorkers clamored for the copies of the Sun, whose circulation soared to 19,360. The future editor of the Tribune, the hapless Horace Greeley, went so far as to join the crowds buying up copies of the Sun and, in Mr. Goodman’s account, was “stunned by the demand for them, writing in the New-Yorker that they were selling ‘faster than all the Bible Societies in the universe could give away the Sacred Book.’”The Sun, not to put too fine a point on it, had overnight become the largest newspaper in the world. And a distinguished one. It had emerged in its earliest issues as an opponent of slavery. It would evolve into a public-spirited paper in the city (to prove the concept, it built, in secret, the first operational subway in New York). Under Charles Dana, it became by the end of the 19th century the world’s first modern broadsheet.Yet nearly 187 years later, the Sun has yet to correct or retract the moon story. The paper did issue an editorial noting that “some persons of little faith” considered the yarn about lunar man bats “an adroit fiction.” It went on, though, to note that “other readers” construed the series as an “elaborate satire upon the monstrous fabrications of the political press of the country and the various genera and species of its party editors.”No more monstrous, we’d posit, than the fabrications of the political press and the genera and species of its party editors in our own time. “Today,” the current editor of the Sun wrote a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, “newspaper circulation gimmicks” — he cited global warming, the threat of immigration, or the miracle balm of higher taxes — “tend to be tamer.” Then again, too, he noted, “circulation has been falling.”Not here at the Sun. One hundred and eighty-nine years after the flag of the Sun was hoisted in New York, circulation — page views, paid online subscriptions, the newsletter mailing lists — all are soaring. The open rate for our twice-a-day emails to readers is well above the industry average. No doubt we have a long way to go, but the publisher is in a fine mood and has asked us on this anniversary to extend to all our readers a note of thanks.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Press

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