[1] Thompson's offered the following subscription options:[2]: 239 The publication's audience included bankers and merchants ranging from New York City to the western states.

[2]: 239–240  One Wisconsin banker recalled that "the merchant in his store or the peddler on the prairies would as soon think of doing their business without scales, measure, or yardstick as without a Thompson's, or some other bank note reporter of recent date".

[1] The front page of the reporter typically contained a small number of editorials and breaking financial news.

[a] A notice in the New-York American on December 31, 1841 announced it as "a new Weekly Paper, under the title of Thompson's Bank Reporter, in pamphlet form, containing sixteen pages" to be issued beginning January 4, 1842.

At the time of its debut, there were two other noteworthy existing bank note reporters being published in the city, one of them by Archibald McIntyre.

In July 1884, the New York Times published an exposé uncovering a large-scale blackmail scheme in which the publishers of Thompson's Reporter had, for years, been sending letters to banks around the country requesting payment for subscriptions or advertisements in the reporter, threatening to give them a negative rating if they did not comply.

[8] Ultimately, Haver was convicted of a misdemeanour and, in October 1885, a judge imposed a fine of $500; he was spared a prison sentence in light of his agreement that he would retire from publishing the paper.

[9] According to a profile of Charles David Steurer in the 1896 biographical compilation Men of the Century, an Historical Work, the facility at which Thompson's was printed was destroyed in a fire in 1884.