On September 18, 1851, the first issue of the New-York Daily Times appeared, eight pages, four columns, one cent. It was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond, a 31-year-old politician and journalist, and George Jones, a banker, with money borrowed from friends in Albany. The paper sold out that morning and kept selling, and it has appeared every day since.
Raymond's idea was a paper that was not a party organ. New York in 1851 had the Herald, which sold scandal and crime and was the biggest paper in the country; the Tribune under Horace Greeley, which was Whig and reformist; and a dozen others, most of them openly tied to a faction. The Times was to be Whig in sympathy but independent in practice, aimed at the commercial classes, and cleaner than its competitors. Its first editorial promised moderation, and it attacked the Tribune by name within a week.
News gathering made it work. The paper covered the European revolutions and the Crimean War with correspondents, printed shipping and market news in detail, and in the 1850s ran the reporting on the slave trade and on the Kansas fighting that the cheaper papers would not pay for. It was also early into the telegraph and into steam-press printing, which let it print later news than its rivals.
The paper's politics moved. Raymond helped found the Republican Party and wrote the party's 1856 address, and the paper supported Lincoln, though it opposed emancipation until 1862. Its coverage of the New York City draft riots in 1863 was the best of any paper. Then it broke with Grant and with the Republican bosses, exposed the Tweed Ring in 1871 with the cartoons of Thomas Nast, and endorsed the Democratic candidate in 1884.
It nearly died in the 1890s, losing money against Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal, and in 1896 Adolph Ochs, a Chattanooga publisher of 38, bought it for about 75,000 dollars. He cut the price back to a cent, dropped the yellow journalism, and made the slogan All the News That's Fit to Print. It reached 780,000 by 1921. The Ochs-Sulzberger family still controls it through a dual share structure.