Arunah S. Abell

Arunah S. Abell was born on August 10, 1806 in Rhode Island. His first employment experience was as an apprentice at the Providence Patriot, where he learned the newspaper business and mastered the cast-iron hand press. His most notable accomplishment was his creation of the penny paper along with his other colleagues, Azariah H. Simmons, William M. Swaim, and Benjamin Day. At first he laughed at the idea of selling a penny newspaper to the general public. But Day argued that this paper would cover the ordinary things people wanted to hear about, such as crime, weather, and local oddballs. In 1836, Abell founded the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

In 1837, Abell founded The Baltimore Sun newspaper and the first issue was published on May 17, 1837. It was an independent newspaper, but it leaned towards the ideals of Jacksonian democracy. Abell experienced much adversity in starting up The Sun, considering that Baltimore already had six daily papers and America was still recovering from the Great Depression. But within the first seven months, The Sun had 12,000 daily readers. The Mexican-American War established The Sun as a great paper. Abell created a communications network to New Orleans including steamships, stagecoaches, railways, and telagraph lines. This intricate network aided Abell in discovering the Mexican army’s surrender in the siege of Vera Cruz. Abell is credited with notifying President James K. Polk, before the War Department, that the Mexican army had surrendered and effectively ended the Mexican-American War.

Abell created a newspaper that was successful in ways that other newspapers of the time were not. American newspapers at that time served explicitly as bullhorns for political parties or commercial interests. The newspapers had a target audience in mind: society’s elite. But Abell’s Baltimore Sun was successful in providing its readers with news, whether or not it conformed to Abell’s prejudices. Abell's obsession with getting news the fastest helped make The Sun Baltimore's leading newspaper. 

Sources:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/sun-magazine/bs-sm-arunah-s-abell-20120513,0,5422224.story

American Journalists by Donald A. Ritchie