History of The New York Times, 1851-1921

In 1851, a new newspaper debuted in Manhattan with ambitions of seriousness in a city drowning in sensationalism. Within decades, it would nearly die, then be resurrected by a brilliant outsider who transformed it into the most trusted voice in American journalism. Elmer Holmes Davis, who would later become one of广播新闻's most celebrated figures, tells this remarkable story with the insider's knowingness and the historian's precision. This is the story of The New York Times's first seventy years: its founding ideals, its catastrophic near-collapse, and its meteoric rise under Adolph Ochs, the visionary publisher who saved it from irrelevance. Davis traces the paper's pivotal role in exposing Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall corruption, a feat of investigative journalism that helped topple a criminal empire. He examines the paper's complex dance with local and national politics, its surprising position amid the technological revolutions transforming newsrooms, and how a newspaper became an institution that shaped how America understood itself. Written by a man who walked its halls and knew its legends, this book is both an honest assessment and an unmistakable labor of love, a portrait of an institution fighting to define what journalism could and should be.