The Penny Press
On 3 September 1833 the New York Sun went on sale at a penny a copy. The other papers cost five or six cents. The trick behind the price was advertising. Newspapers until then ran on prepaid annual subscriptions and money from political parties; the Sun rearranged that into single copies sold in the street, with the cost carried by advertisers. The reader does not pay; the one who wants to be read pays — that triangle is the true shape of «free», running on to radio, television and the search engine. That said, the penny paper itself was not the first. Boston's Transcript came three years earlier, in 1830 — but on a four-dollar annual subscription, not sold in the street. What was new about the Sun was not the price but the pairing of street sales with advertising revenue. Three years later, La Presse in Paris put the same structure into words far more explicitly: we take advertising, so the subscription is half price. Starting a mechanism and naming a mechanism are two different talents.
The myth, corrected
The Great Moon Hoax sent the paper flying off the streets
It did not. In August 1835 the Sun reported, over six instalments, that there was life on the moon. Yet by the Sun's own published figures, circulation during the series actually fell, to 19,360. The 26,000 just before it was a temporary peak caused by a fire at the printing works of its rival, the Herald. What surged was the public memory. And the Sun never issued a formal retraction. On 16 September it noted obliquely that the account might not be factual; the reporter himself admitted authorship five years later, in a letter to another paper.