The Founders of the 'New York Times' Pledged to Cover 'Every Subject of Public Importance.' 175 Years Later, the Paper Continues to Publish 'All the News That's Fit to Print'

On August 30, 1851, journalists Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones laid out their vision for a newspaper they planned to launch the following month. Called the New-York Daily Times, the publication would be printed daily on a 24-column folio sheet, with morning and evening editions priced at 1 cent each. Raymond, a politician who later co-founded the Republican Party, would serve as the editor of this new daily paper.

Jones, a former banker, would be its publisher and financial manager. Along with presenting the news of the day, the co-founders asserted in their prospectus, the paper would share literary reviews; art criticism; and editorial articles “written with all the ability, care and knowledge which the abundant means at the disposal of the subscribers will enable them to command.” The newspaper’s columns, the pair promised, “will be free from bigoted devotion to narrow interests and will be open, within necessary limitations, to communications upon every subject of public importance.” The first issue of the New-York Daily Times was published on September 18, 1851. Now, 175 years later, both the hyphen and the word “Daily” are gone, but the New York Times remains.

The Times has established itself as “the newspaper of record,” documenting the most significant events in both national and international history. Its past notable headlines include “President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin” in 1865, “Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg” in 1912, “The War in Europe Is Ended!” in 1945, “200,000 March for Civil Rights in Orderly Washington Rally” in 1963 and “Men Walk on Moon” in 1969. And the paper’s influence is still growing: This year, the New York Times Company announced that it had amassed more than 13 million subscribers, “the largest paid subscriber base of any news organization in the world.” The Times has, of course, evolved since its founding.

The past two decades in particular have ushered in rapid changes, says Sam Dolnick, a deputy managing editor at the paper. Dolnick began working at the Times in 2009. Over his 17 years with the company, he’s seen it become “a completely different newsroom,” he says.

Now, it’s a digital newsroom around the clock, around the globe.” David W. Dunlap, a longtime Times employee, serves as curator at the Museum at the Times, a showcase of the paper’s history on the 15th floor of the company’s New York City headquarters. At the museum, Dunlap—who started his career at the Times in 1975, right out of college, as a clerk in the Washington bureau—never loses sight of the publication’s beginnings.

He manages archival materials and offers private tours to colleagues and invited guests. (The museum is closed to the public.) On view at the museum is the front page of the paper’s very first edition. The article given the most space in the September 1851 layout centers on a Pennsylvania “fugitive slave riot.” Earlier that month, in the Lancaster County borough of Christiana, a group of African Americans killed a Maryland enslaver as he attempted to capture men who had fled from bondage on his farm. Raymond wrote multiple editorials about the event, condemning the killing while acknowledging that the men had “acted from their conscientious convictions of duty.” The editor argued that he understood “how such convictions may incline others to abstain from all active agency in sending an escaped slave back to his master,” but he maintained that the group should “be made to feel the utmost penalty of the law.” In other words, Dunlap says, Raymond was “more concerned with the fact that the men … have violated the law and have murdered someone than he is with the overall immorality of slavery.” Beyond showing the front page of the Times’ first issue, Dunlap takes visitors through the storeroom that houses the museum’s off-view artifacts.