Founded by
James Gordon Bennett Sr. as
The Evening Telegram in 1867, the newspaper began as the evening edition of
The New York Herald, which itself published its first issue in 1835. Following Bennett's death, newspaper and magazine owner
Frank A. Munsey purchased
The Telegram in June 1920. Munsey's associate Thomas W. Dewart, the late publisher and president of the
New York Sun, owned the paper for two years after Munsey died in 1925 before selling it to the
E. W. Scripps Company for an undisclosed sum in 1927. At the time of the sale, the paper was known as
The New York Telegram, and it had a circulation of 200,000. The newspaper became the
World-Telegram in 1931, following the sale of the
New York World by the heirs of
Joseph Pulitzer to
Scripps Howard. In October 1936 the papers reporter
H. R. Ekins won a race
to travel around the world on commercial airline flights, beating
Dorothy Kilgallen of the
New York Journal and
Leo Kieran of
The New York Times. The race took 18 ½ days. In 1940, the paper carried a series of articles entitled "The Rape of China," which used
Walter Judd's experiences with Japanese soldiers as the basis of support for a campaign to boycott Japanese goods. Publisher
Roy Howard, an expert of sorts after travelling to Manchuria and Japan in the early 1930s, gave extensive coverage of Japanese atrocities in China. The paper's headline of December 8, 1941, read "1500 Dead in Hawaii" in its coverage of Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor.
New York World-Telegram and The Sun In 1950, the paper was renamed the
New York World-Telegram and The Sun after the Dewart family sold Scripps the remnants of another New York afternoon paper,
The Sun. Liebling once described
The Sun on the combined publication's
nameplate as resembling the tail feathers of a canary on the chin of a cat. Beginning in July 1956, the paper became a center of attention when its reporters Gene Gleason and
Fred J. Cook launched an investigative series on New York City Parks Commissioner
Robert Moses. Gleason and Cook focused on possible corruption in how Moses was implementing "Title I: Slum Clearance & Community Development & Redevelopment" of the U.S.
Housing Act of 1949. The information they revealed in the
World-Telegram and Sun was a vital resource for
Robert Caro's
Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses entitled
The Power Broker (1974).
New York World Journal Tribune Early in 1966, a proposal to create New York's first
joint operating agreement (JOA) led to the merger of the
World-Telegram and The Sun with Hearst's
Journal American. The intention was to produce a joint afternoon edition, with a separate morning paper to be produced by the
Herald Tribune. The last edition of the
World-Telegram and The Sun was published on April 23, 1966. But when strikes prevented the JOA from taking effect, the papers instead united in August 1966 to become the short-lived
New York World Journal Tribune, which lasted only until May 5, 1967. Its closure left New York City with three daily newspapers:
The New York Times,
New York Post, and
New York Daily News. The archives of the paper are not available online, but they can be accessed at the
Library of Congress, the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at several research facilities in the state of New York. ==Gallery==