Crime Reporting from 8:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

Paper Summary:

The writer traces news from the Penny Press to the Present Press, showing how crime has evolved to become the most important feature in written or electronically produced news. To simplify: crime is news. Printed news about crime and justice is nearly as old as the printed word itself.

From the Paper:

"New York, 1841: Mary Rogers' body has just been discovered. Rarely do the editorial pages condemn the lack of crime control in the city; instead the papers are either fictionalizing the crime and making up stories to fit the facts or extrapolating from the crime and using the story to represent the city itself. James Gordon Bennett was the editor of the New York Herald and a symbol in journalism for sensationalism and libelous reporting. He has been noted as "the principal figure in the rise of the new urban journalism and the creation of the Mary Rogers story". His and other newspapers followed the saga of the story, and along with it delved into the issues that surrounded the case: it appeared that Mary had gone to have an abortion; it came out that she had been seen with several different suitors; she was a working woman who helped run a boarder house; all of these issues that were central to the crime itself were expanded in the newspapers to represent the whole city, with "Mary herself serving as an extended metaphor for the city." "

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