On its first day, the New York Sun reportedly sold about three hundred copies. It was a start, but still a money-loser; to get it off the ground Day would have to do much better. He continued to find his best stories at New York's police court, with its "dismal parade of drunkards and wife beaters, con men and petty thieves, prostitutes and their johns." Copying a British publication, therefore, he hired a man called George Wisner (for $4 a week) just to cover the court, creating quite possibly "the first full-time news reporter in U.S. history."

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 33