Trace the turbulent history of newspapers in New York

(Recommended for ages 16 and up)

Private Group: Please contact us for pricing and availability

Duration

2.5 hours (We will send the meeting place when you sign up)

Overview

It is impossible to tell the story of New York City without telling the story of its newspapers, which have been chronicling and shaping the rise of Gotham almost from the city's founding — the first newspaper in the city begins publishing in 1725, 60 years after New York became a British Colony and 64 years before the First Amendment guaranteed the right to a free press.

Together, the city grew together with the people and institutions who would document its emergence. From the city’s beginnings to modern-day, New Yorkers have developed an insatiable thirst for news and information, and the newspaper industry rose to quench that thirst with news coverage that continued to evolve with the city, not just chronicling the Big Apple, but reflecting it as it changed politically, demographically, socially and economically. Along the way, the newspapers and the people who wrote for, edited and published them became synonymous with the city, achieving fame and fortune.

This walking tour will be led by licensed New York City tour guide Michael Morgenthal, a former reporter and editor who has been fascinated by the New York Newspaper scene from the time of his first job, assembling the Sunday New York Times in his uncle's store — he often says the ink seeped into his blood and never left! We will see New York through the eyes of the legendary reporters, editors and publishers who shaped New York and the United States through their words, cartoons and photographs.

Walking Tour Highlights

• The famous libel trial of early NYC newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger, which served as a precursor to the establishment of the Freedom of the Press decades later in the Bill of Rights.
• Alexander Hamilton, the New York Post, and the overt politics and "Fake News" of post-Revolution New York City's newspapers
• The newspaper was between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which ushered in the age of mass media thanks to "Yellow Journalism."
• How architecture cemented the permanence of the media with a special focus on the many gorgeous buildings in and around Newspaper Row in downtown Manhattan — most of which no longer exist. *The New York Sun, the "Penny Press" and the emergence of the modern newspaper
• The New York Times' rise from a second-rate rag to the preeminent newspaper in the United States.
• Legendary newspaper figures such as William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, Benjamin Day, the Bennetts, Dorothy Schiff, Nellie Bly, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and Pete Hamill.
• The stories behind some of the most famous newspaper articles in New York's history, such as "Ford to City: Drop Dead" and "Headless Body in Topless Bar."
• The decline of the daily newspaper in New York City.

Please Note

The walking tour runs rain or shine — dress for the weather!