About Daily Graphic

Daily Graphic

The Daily Graphic was an illustrated evening newspaper published in New York City from March 1873 until September 23, 1889. Its full title was The Daily Graphic: An Illustrated Evening Newspaper, and it held a genuine place in American journalism history: it was the first American newspaper with daily illustrations. At a time when the great illustrated papers were weeklies, the Graphic attempted the far harder task of producing pictures every day, and in doing so it pioneered techniques, including the newspaper halftone photograph and the daily weather map, that later became universal.

The paper was never a financial success, and its peak circulation was modest, around 10,000 copies. Yet its sixteen years of publication were crowded with experiment. Its founders were Canadian engravers who brought new photomechanical processes to New York, its first editor was a former managing editor of the New York World who published poems by Walt Whitman, and its pages carried everything from lavish engravings of public events to the first photograph printed in a newspaper directly from a photographic negative.

Canadian Founders

The Daily Graphic was founded in 1873 by George-Édouard Desbarats and William Leggo, Canadian engravers who had enjoyed success in printing in Canada. Flush with that success, they relocated to New York in 1873 to launch an illustrated daily in the largest newspaper market in the United States. Their wager was that the technology of pictorial reproduction, which had made illustrated weeklies popular, could be adapted to the speed and frequency of a daily newspaper.

The business management of the new paper was initially headed by Charles and James Goodsell. The editorial chair went to David Croly, the former managing editor of the New York World, who served as the Graphic's initial editor from 1873 through 1878. The combination was ambitious: Canadian printing innovators, experienced New York newspaper managers, and an editor drawn from one of the city's great dailies. The paper's headquarters stood at 39 and 41 Park Place in Manhattan, in the heart of the city's newspaper district.

A Paper Built Around Pictures

The Graphic was highly illustrated, and its lavish engravings were its reason for existence. Its pages included cartoons, reproductions of paintings, and illustrations of contemporary news events and notable personalities. Where a conventional daily described an event in type, the Graphic tried to show it, commissioning artists and engravers to render scenes, faces, and spectacles for the next edition.

The economics of that ambition were punishing. Producing fresh engravings every day required a large and expensive staff of artists and craftsmen, and contemporary reporting on the cost of publishing picture papers noted that the Graphic had been unprofitable. The paper sold for five cents in 1873, a premium price at a moment when many New York dailies sold for far less, and the price had fallen to three cents by 1889. Its circulation, peaking at about 10,000, never matched the mass readership of the cheap penny press tradition, and the gap between its costs and its revenues pursued it throughout its life.

Croly, Whitman, and a Word from Mark Twain

David Croly, the Graphic's first editor, was an admirer of Walt Whitman, and he published a number of Whitman's poems in the paper. The association gave the young illustrated daily a literary dimension unusual in a publication devoted to pictures, and the Whitman Archive later documented the appearances of Whitman's work in the New York Daily Graphic.

The paper also drew a celebrated reaction from Mark Twain, who wrote to Croly after seeing the first issue. Twain remarked, in substance, that he did not care much for reading but liked looking at pictures, and that the illustrated weeklies did not come as often as he needed them. The quip captured exactly the appetite the Graphic hoped to serve: a public eager for images in an age when illustrated journalism appeared, for most readers, only once a week.

The Balloon Stunt of 1873

The Graphic announced itself with one of the great publicity stunts of nineteenth-century journalism. In 1873, its first year, the paper sponsored an attempt by the balloonist Washington Donaldson to cross the Atlantic Ocean by balloon. The flight proved unsuccessful, and Donaldson's balloon team came down far short of its goal, but the venture drew significant attention to the new paper, exactly as its promoters intended.

The stunt set the tone for the Graphic's approach to news. The paper's front page of October 7, 1873 showed Donaldson's balloon team ascending on the ill-fated attempt, turning its own promotional enterprise into illustrated news. Sponsored spectacle, self-promotion, and pictorial coverage were woven together in a style that anticipated much of the sensational illustrated journalism of the following decades.

Photographic Firsts and Stephen Horgan

The Graphic's most durable achievements were technical. The engraver Stephen Henry Horgan helped push the paper's photographic printing efforts, and under his influence the Graphic achieved two landmarks. On December 2, 1873, it published an image of Steinway Hall made from a photograph, an early instance of a picture printed in a newspaper directly from a photograph, transferred from a negative by the firm's own patented process of granulated photography, without the intervention of artist or engraver.

Then, in its issue of March 4, 1880, the Graphic published a picture of a shantytown scene in New York that became famous as the first halftone photograph ever printed by a newspaper. The halftone screen, which translated a photograph's tones into a pattern of dots that a press could reproduce, was the process on which all later newspaper photography depended. That a financially struggling evening paper achieved the breakthrough testified to the concentration of engraving talent its founders had assembled.

The First Daily Weather Map

The Graphic was also the first American newspaper to print a daily weather map. The feature began in its edition of May 9, 1879. The United States government provided the map through its weather services and paid the paper ten dollars a day to run it, an arrangement that continued through September 1882, when the service ended.

The weather map belonged to the same spirit as the paper's illustrations: it presented information visually, at a glance, in a form readers could use every day. Weather maps later became a fixture of American newspapers, and the Graphic's three years of daily publication of the government map stood as an early demonstration that a newspaper could serve as a regular channel for scientific and governmental information presented in graphic form.

Financial Struggle and the Founders' Departure

For all its innovation, the Graphic was not a financial success. The cost of its engravings, the size of the staff required to produce them daily, and its limited circulation kept the enterprise under strain. Desbarats eventually returned to Montreal, and Leggo had followed him back to Canada at least by 1879. The founders' departure removed the paper's original technical leadership within its first decade, even though publication continued in New York.

The Graphic persisted without them for another decade, a diminished but still distinctive presence among New York's evening papers. A weekly compilation, the Weekly Graphic, was also offered and was available by delivery through the mail, extending the paper's illustrations to readers beyond the city. Isaac M. Gregory served as editor from 1882 to 1885, before moving on to edit the humor magazine Judge, one of the periodicals with which the Graphic competed for the illustrated audience.

Final Years and Closure in 1889

By the late 1880s the Graphic's position had weakened further. Its price had been reduced from five cents to three cents, but the reduction did not restore its fortunes. The paper's pioneering processes were being absorbed by better-capitalized competitors, and the illustrated weekly and, increasingly, the illustrated elements of the great metropolitan dailies eroded its reason to exist.

The Daily Graphic ceased publication on September 23, 1889, after sixteen and a half years. Its run had begun with a transatlantic balloon and ended quietly, but in between it had changed what a newspaper could look like. Its name had no connection to the later New York Evening Graphic, the tabloid published from 1924 to 1932 that became famous for Walter Winchell's gossip column; the two papers were separate enterprises separated by a generation.

Legacy

The Daily Graphic was remembered less for its business history than for its firsts. It was the first American newspaper with daily illustrations, the publisher of the first halftone photograph printed by a newspaper, an early printer of a photograph directly from a negative, and the first American paper to carry a daily weather map. Each of those innovations became standard practice in the century that followed.

The paper also illustrated a recurring pattern in media history: the pioneer that proved a technology's value was not always the enterprise that profited from it. Desbarats and Leggo demonstrated that readers wanted pictures daily, that photographs could be printed on newspaper presses, and that visual information could anchor a daily feature. Larger and richer newspapers took those lessons and built the illustrated mass press of the twentieth century on them, while the Daily Graphic itself survived only in archives and in the history of the craft it had helped to transform.