The penny press made the news and journalism more important and also caused newspapers to begin to pay more attention to the public they served.

Unlike most later penny papers, Walter's Transcript maintained what was considered good taste, featuring coverage of literature and the theater.

[4] Frederic Hudson, one of the first to write about the history of American journalism, believed the rise of the penny press to be a key factor in the development of the modern newspaper.

[4] The penny press arrived in New York on January 1, 1833, when Horatio David Shepard teamed up with Horace Greeley and Francis W. Story and issued the Morning Post.

Although both Greeley and Story went on to fame and fortune in the New York press world, the concept of bringing out a penny paper belonged exclusively to Shepard.

He made a habit of taking daily walks through the teeming streets of the Bowery, where he observed merchants selling small items for a penny apiece.

[6] Day introduced The Sun in New York, which appealed to a wide audience, using a simpler, more direct style, vivid language, and human interest stories.

Its motto, printed at the top of every page, was "The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, all the news of the day, and at the same time offer an advantageous medium for advertisements.

This plan included using young newsboys hawking their newspapers on the streets, soon greatly increasing circulation and decreasing costs for printing each copy.

[6] James Gordon Bennett's (1795-1872) subsequent 1835 founding of the New York Herald added another dimension to the new penny press newspapers, now common in journalistic practice.

Whereas newspapers had generally relied on documents as sources, Bennett introduced the practices of observation and interviewing to provide stories with more vivid details.

He realized that "there was more journalistic money to be made in recording gossip that interested bar-rooms, work-shops, racecourses, and tenement houses, than in consulting the tastes of drawing rooms and libraries."

[4] Copying the idea of the Northern newspapers, in 1837, Francis Lumsden and George Wilkins Kendall established The Picayune further south on the Gulf of Mexico coast in New Orleans.

The paper's initial price was one picayune, a Spanish coin equivalent to 6¼¢ (half a bit, or one-sixteenth of an American dollar of that time).

[12] Originally sold at one cent per paper, it became famous for incorporating journalistic standards that are common today, as well as having very high-quality reporting and writing.

[15] In the early 1800s, newspapers were largely for the elite and took two forms – mercantile sheets that were intended for the business community and contained ship schedules, wholesale product prices, advertisements and some stale foreign news, and political newspapers that were controlled by political parties or their editors as a means of sharing their views with elite stakeholders.

[16][page needed] The emergence of the penny press greatly influenced communication technologies by covering news outside those of government interests.

[17][page needed] Penny papers hired reporters and correspondents to seek out and write the news, while at the same time, started to sound more journalistic than editorial.

New journalism practices resulted in the development of concepts such as news reporting, emphasizing the importance of timeliness, and appealing to wider audiences.

This allowed them to shift allegiance on political issues that the papers dealt with quite easily, which also aided in their success and acceptance by the general public.

They also focused on investigating topics with more factual-based information rather than opinion-based articles, which gave the paper a less biased form of news than the elite newspapers, which were often published by those with special interests.

[19] They also wrote about the stock market, entertainers, politics, sports, and weather, all of which became important news and are still considered absolute necessities in a newspaper, thanks to the penny press.