Stanton's Dispatch and The New York Herald

During the same time that Gobright was gathering witnesses for his report, Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton was doing reporting of his own. His high position in government allowed him to not only take control of the government, but also gather nearly all of the assassin’s names by 1 a.m.

Stanton wrote dispatches to be released to New York newspapers, which were full of information. The New York Herald ran Stanton’s dispatch the next day on the front page, contents unedited. Later in the Herald’s article are Gobright’s dispatches included, the earliest being at 12:30 a.m. (5)

Read the original paper here: 

Stanton’s reporting style in his first dispatch exhibits the way of things to come. The inverted pyramid style of reporting is starkly familiar, but this was not the way reporting was done at the time. Gobright’s report was much more representative of the methods reporters used, a stream of consciousness account of how things came to be. It takes the reader four paragraphs to get to the President’s injury, whereas it only takes one sentence in Stanton’s account. (5) Today inverted pyramid is taught in introduction journalism classes across the world.