What date was the New-York Daily Times first published and who founded it?
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Executive summary
The New-York Daily Times published its first issue on September 18, 1851, and it was founded by journalist Henry Jarvis Raymond and banker George Jones under the partnership Raymond, Jones & Company [1] [2]. Contemporary and archival records consistently identify that date and those two founders, and they note the paper began as the New-York Daily Times before later becoming The New York Times [3] [4].
1. Founding date: the first issue, September 18, 1851
The New-York Daily Times’ inaugural issue is dated September 18, 1851, a fact corroborated across primary record listings and secondary histories: the Library of Congress lists Vol. 1, No. 1 as Sept. 18, 1851 [5], university archives and bibliographies mark the same launch date [3], and modern histories repeat that date when tracing the newspaper’s origin [1] [4]. Even company timelines and reference compendia frame the paper’s continuous publication from that specific September day in 1851 [6] [7].
2. The founders: Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones
The paper was established by Henry Jarvis Raymond, a journalist who had worked with Horace Greeley and who later became a political figure, and George Jones, a former banker and business manager—together forming Raymond, Jones & Company to issue the New-York Daily Times [1] [8] [9]. Multiple institutional histories and archival descriptions name Raymond and Jones as founding partners and note Raymond served as the paper’s first editor until his death in 1869 [7] [8].
3. Early location and editorial intent: a penny paper with a different pitch
Contemporary accounts and the paper’s prospectus place the earliest operations in downtown Manhattan—reported as basement offices on Nassau Street—and describe the founders raising capital to launch a penny paper that aimed at accurate, restrained reporting rather than the sensational “yellow journalism” dominant among rivals [1] [9] [8]. Those early editorial promises appear in the first issue announcement and in surviving company records such as the prospectus dated August 30, 1851 [2] [8].
4. Name evolution and later ownership that sometimes confuses the narrative
Although the newspaper began as the New-York Daily Times in 1851, histories record a sequence of title changes—shortening to The New-York Times in the 1850s and eventually losing the hyphen to become The New York Times by 1890—while the enterprise itself passed into new hands, most notably to Adolph S. Ochs in 1896 who reshaped its fortunes and coined its famous slogan [2] [10] [11]. These later milestones—ownership change and branding shifts—are often foregrounded in popular accounts, but they do not alter the documented founding date or founders identified in contemporaneous issues and archival catalogs [3] [9].
5. Sources, consistency and limitations in the record
Primary library catalogues and archival holdings—such as the Library of Congress serial entry and university digital newspaper collections—align with secondary scholarship from institutional histories and research guides in giving September 18, 1851 and Raymond and Jones as the paper’s origin story [5] [3] [1] [4]. There is broad consensus among the cited sources; if there remain any disputes or alternate claims about the founding details, they do not appear in the provided reporting, and this account is limited to the sources provided here [1] [8] [7].