It was Day's plan to make a paper not for the classes which
were already well served by the six-penny sheets, but for the
masses who had no newspaper. Starting with a circulation of
three hundred, The Sun rapidly prospered until very shortly it
was pressing hard the old conservative sheets. True to his origi-
nal plans Day turned out a paper which gave in a condensed
form the mechanics and the servant-girls the tittle-tattle and the
gossip of the town. To make both ends meet he had to keep down
the size of his paper, which was four pages with three columns
of ten inches to the page, but it is wonderful how much news he
was able to boil down and print in his limited sheet. At the start
The Sun was not edited with any great ability until Day secured
George W. Wisner, who was one of the first American journalists
to realize the value of the police court as a source of news. Al-
ready Wisner had been a police court reporter for the paper, for
which service he received the magnificent wage of four dollars
per week. To him the "assault and battery" cases of the police
court were more interesting than the attacks of Jackson on the
United States Bank.
In 1837 Day sold the paper to his sister's husband, Moses Y. Beach, for forty thousand dollars. The Sun remained in the Beach family, save for a temporary eclipse when it was pub- lished as a daily religious newspaper, until it was sold to Charles Anderson Dana and his associates, who assumed control on January 25, 1868. After Day retired from The Sun he became the publisher of The True Sun, which shed its light, such as it was, first on November 25, 1842. It shone for only a brief period of two years and then set. This second paper by Day should not be confused with The True Sun started on January 22, 1835, by W. F. Short and S. B. Butler, which suffered a total eclipse after four days.
EAELY LOCAL RIVALS
The success of The Sun led to the establishment of penny papers not only in New York, but also in all the other more im- portant cities of the country such as Philadelphia, Boston, Balti- more, Albany, etc. The immediate rival of The Sun in New York was The Transcript started on March 14, 1834, by three composi-
