From the Wikipedia: James Gordon Bennett, Sr.

James Gordon Bennett Sr. was an enterprising businessman, a pioneering newspaperman, a groundbreaking journalist and something of an asshat. That last part is not stated explicitly on his Wikipedia page.

Bennett was born to a prosperous Catholic family in Scotland in 1795 and entered the seminary, but dropped out to read a bunch, flit about and do nothing particularly interesting for about 15 years.

In 1835, after a recent drop in newspaper production costs, Bennett began editing the New York Herald, one of several new penny papers aimed at broader audiences than earlier five-cent papers. Not much of this is in the Wikipedia, incidentally.

Bennett, desperate to distinguish his paper from the rest, introduced illustrations and established the first foreign correspondents in newspapers.

He also essentially invented the gossip column — the first “society pages” — and began, as early as the 1830s, the sensationalism we still associate with the struggle to sell papers in competitive markets. Bennett exploited every angle of the high-profile murder cases of Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers, even doubling back on his stories and contradicting his reporting, to keep headlines astonishing. And he sold a whole lot of papers.

The New York Herald, under Bennett’s watch, was essentially the O.G. New York Post.

Needless to say, he pissed some people off in the process. Namely just about every other newspaper editor in the city, none of whom had quite yet figured how to spin the news as wildly as Bennett could.

Oh, but since all the papers were new and basically all the brainchildren of single editors, they all fought in print (and sometimes in the streets). Here’s how the editor of the New York Aurora, young Walt Whitman — that Walt Whitman, the Leaves of Grass guy — described Bennett:

A reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh or fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth; a creature, hated by his nearest intimates, and bearing the consciousness thereof upon his distorted features, and upon his despicable soul; one whom good men avoid as a blot to his nature — whom all despise, and whom no one blesses — all this is James Gordon Bennett.

Anyway, obviously a lot of this isn’t from the Wikipedia. Feel free to add it if you’d like — cite the excellent book The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman. I bring it up only because it seems like when people mention newspapers blowing things out of proportion to sell papers — or blogs doing it to draw clicks, for that matter — they act as if it’s something new.

But it’s as old as newspapers themselves. It’s part of the business. Obviously if the headlines get too absurd, the paper will become a joke and not as many people will buy it. There’s got to be a balance. But it’s been like that forever.

Apparently in Great Britain, “Gordon Bennett” is an expression of incredulity, and one I plan on using from here on out on this blog because it is amazing. That has nothing to do with James Gordon Bennett, Sr., but rather his son, who used the paper’s profits to go to Europe and behave flamboyantly. The younger Bennett also had an excellent mustache. Gordon Bennett! Look at that thing.