[16] During the American Civil War, Bennett kept at least 24 correspondents in the field, opened a Southern desk and had reporters comb the hospitals to develop lists of casualties and deliver messages from the wounded to their families.

Greeley, a native of New Hampshire, had begun publishing a weekly paper called The New-Yorker (unrelated to the magazine of the same name) in 1834, which won attention for its political reporting and editorials.

[25] Raymond, who felt he was "overused and underpaid" as a reporter on the Tribune staff, later served in the New York State Assembly and, with the backing of bankers in Albany, founded the Times in 1851, which quickly became a rival for the Whig readership that Greeley cultivated.

[33] Whitelaw Reid, who won control of the Tribune in part due to the likely assistance of financier Jay Gould,[34] turned the newspaper into an orthodox Republican organ, wearing "its stubborn editorial and typographical conservatism…as a badge of honor".

Joseph Pulitzer, who came from St. Louis and purchased the New York World in 1882, aggressively marketed a mix of crime stories and social reform editorials to a predominantly immigrant audience, and saw his circulation quickly surpass those of more established publishers.

Reid also encouraged the development of women's features at the newspaper, the hiring of female writers,[66] and helped establish a "home institute" that tested recipes and household products.

[81] Stanley Walker, who became the newspaper's city editor in 1928, pushed his staff (which briefly included Joseph Mitchell) to write in a clear, lively style, and pushed the Herald Tribune's local coverage "to a new kind of social journalism that aimed at capturing the temper and feel of the city, its moods and fancies, changes or premonitions of change in its manners, customs, taste, and thought—daily helpings of what amounted to urban anthropology".

[82] The Herald Tribune's editorials remained conservative—"a spokesman for and guardian of mainstream Republicanism"[83]—but the newspaper also hired columnist Walter Lippmann, seen at the time as a liberal, after The World closed its doors in 1931.

[85] Seeking to cut costs during the Recession of 1937, the newspaper's management decided to consolidate its foreign coverage under Laurence Hills, who had been appointed editor of the Paris Herald by Frank Munsey in 1920 and kept the paper profitable.

[86] But Hills had fascist sympathies—the Paris Herald was alone among American newspapers in having "ad columns sprout(ing) with swastikas and fasces[87]—and was more interested in cutting costs than producing journalism.

"It is no longer the desire even to attempt to run parallel with The New York Times in special dispatches from Europe," Hills wrote in a memo to the Herald Tribune's foreign bureaus in late 1937.

[92] Historians of The New York Times—including Gay Talese, Susan Tifft and Alex S. Jones—have argued that the Times, faced with newsprint rationing during World War II, decided to increase its news coverage at the expense of its advertising, while the Herald Tribune chose to run more ads, trading short-term profit for long-term difficulties.

The evidence that this disproportionate increase in the Tribune's advertising content left its readers feeling deprived of war news coverage and sent them in droves to the Times is, at best, highly ambiguous.

The Reid family was long accustomed to resolve shortfalls at the newspaper with subsidies from their fortune, rather than improved business practices, seeing the paper "as a hereditary possession to be sustained as a public duty rather than developed as a profit-making opportunity".

[103] With its generally marginal profitability, the Herald Tribune had few opportunities to reinvest in its operations as the Times did, and the Reids' mortgage on the newspaper made it difficult to raise outside cash for needed capital improvements.

The investment squeezed the paper's resources, and Robinson decided to make up the difference at the end of the year by raising the Tribune's price from three cents to a nickel, expecting the Times, which also needed to upgrade its facilities, to do the same.

[113][114] The paper distinguished itself in its coverage of the Korean War; Bigart and Marguerite Higgins, who engaged in a fierce rivalry, shared a Pulitzer Prize with Chicago Daily News correspondent Keyes Beech and three other reporters in 1951.

[120] His promotions included printing the sports section on green newsprint[121] and a pocket-sized magazine for television listings that initially stopped the Sunday paper's circulation skid, but proved an empty product.

In 1961—the same year Whitney returned to New York—the Tribune hired John Denson, a Newsweek editor and native of Louisiana who was "a critical mass of intensity and irascibility relieved by interludes of amiability.

Denson "swept away the old front-page architecture, essentially vertical in structure"[138] and laid out stories horizontally, with unorthodox and sometimes cryptic headlines; large photos and information boxes.

[145] A western edition of the newspaper, launched in 1961 by new publisher Orvil Dryfoos in an attempt to build the paper's national audience, also proved to be a drain and the Times profits fell to $59,802 by the end of 1961.

Times managing editor Turner Catledge began visiting the city room of his newspaper to read the early edition of the Tribune and sometimes responded with changes, though he ultimately decided Denson's approach would be unsuccessful.

[156] Dryfoos died of a heart ailment shortly after the strike and was replaced as Times publisher by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who ended merger talks with the Tribune because "it just didn't make any long-term sense to me.

Bellows kept Denson's format but "eliminated features that lacked substance or sparkle"[158] while promoting new talent, including movie critic Judith Crist and Washington columnists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans.

"[160] Tom Wolfe, who joined the paper after working at The Washington Post, wrote lengthy features about city life; asking an editor how long his pieces should be, he received the reply "until it gets boring.

That summer, Bellows wrote to Matt Meyer, the head of the new company, that it would be "almost impossible—with the present staff—to publish a Herald Tribune I would be proud to be the editor of, or be able to compete with successfully in the morning field."

Van Doren also selected its guests, typically three per event, who included Jane Jacobs, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Moses, Rachel Carson, and John Kenneth Galbraith, among others.

[185] The edition looked positively on the emergence of European fascism, cheering on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia as well as the German remilitarization of the Rhineland and annexation of Austria and calling for a fascist party to exist in the United States.

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless, the lead female character Patricia (Jean Seberg) is an American student journalist who sells the European edition on the streets of Paris.

"[198] The drawing included a clock in the center, set to 6:12 p.m., and two figures on either side of it, a toga-clad thinker facing leftward and a young child holding an American flag marching rightward.