Though Webb was too explosive, too dissipated, and too slender in ability to be a great editor, he had the money to obtain able lieutenants. One was the Jewish journalist M. M. Noah, who had edited the _National Advocate_ in Coleman’s day, and written patriotic dramas. In 1825, conceiving that the time had come for the “restoration of the Jews,” Noah had appeared at Grand Island, near Buffalo, in the insignia of one of the Hebrew monarchs, and dedicated it as the future Jerusalem and capital of the Jewish nation, calling it Ararat in honor of the original Noah. Disillusioned in this project, Noah bought a share in the _Courier_ in 1831, and in 1832 resigned it. Another worker on the _Courier_ was Charles King; James K. Paulding contributed; and in the forties it obtained Henry J. Raymond’s services. But the most notable of its writers when the year 1829 ended was a smart young Scotchman named James Gordon Bennett, who, after knocking about from Boston to Charleston in various employments--he had even essayed to open a commercial school in New York--had made a shining success in 1828 as Washington correspondent for Webb.
Bennett, at this time highly studious, had examined in the Congressional Library one day a copy of Horace Walpole’s letters, and at once began to imitate them in his correspondence, making it lively, full of gossip, and even vulgarly frank in descriptions of men of the day. Some Washington ladies were said to be indebted to Bennett’s glowing pen-pictures for their husbands. He was active in other capacities for the journal--he reported the White-Crowinshield murder trial in Salem, Mass., wrote editorials, squibs, and amusing articles of sorts; and Webb showed how fundamentally lacking he was in editorial discernment when he never let Bennett receive more than $12 a week. In 1832 the homely, thrifty youngster from Banffshire left the _Courier_.
Others among the eleven dailies were the _Commercial Advertiser_, the _Daily Advertiser_, and the _Star_, the last-named being the _Post’s_ closest rival in evening circulation. Much attention was attracted to the _Daily Advertiser_ in 1835 by the Washington letters of Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded the _Express_, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy obstacles. Compared with London, the New York field was overcrowded, and no journal had many subscribers; the _Courier_ was vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them into vice. Advertising rates continued ridiculously small. The _Evening Post_ and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of $40, with a subscription thrown in, for indefinite space; the first insertion of a “square,” 8 to 16 lines, cost seventy-five cents, the second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the _Courier_ (apart from yearly insertions) reached $55, that sum was thought remarkable.