When Henry Raymond and George Jones launched The New-York Daily Times on Sept. 18, 1851, the journalism landscape was, as one competitor put it, "an unusually dull day for business generally." Most newspapers like The Sun and The Courier filled front pages with ads for scrap iron and black-eyed peas rather than news.

More serious dailies offered meatier content. Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune announced new books on its front page but buried stories like a riot in Key West, Fla., inside. The New York Herald boldly led with hard news sent by telegraph about conspirators arrested in France and President Millard Fillmore's visit to Rhode Island.

Raymond also competed with advocacy papers promoting abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Prominent among them was Frederick Douglass' Paper, published in Rochester, N.Y. Writers lacked bylines, and correspondents used prime front-page space for travel musings about vineyards on the Rhine. A brief nod to Margaret Fuller, the first American female war correspondent covering battles in Europe for The Tribune in the late 1840s, was a rare exception in a male-dominated field.