The 1830s newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett pioneered trolling as an attention strategy

Evidence

When not chronicling death in its many forms, Bennett loved to gain attention for his paper by hurling insults and starting fights. Once he managed in a single issue to insult seven rival papers and their editors. He was perhaps the media’s first bona fide “troll.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s attention/surveillance interest: modern engagement-bait trolling has a documented 1830s ancestor in newspaper economics. — connects to: The first spammer foreshadowed the troll as a fixture of attention industries — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 664
• SEED: Article angle: the invention of the troll — how insult-as-attention-harvest was born with penny-press economics, predating every digital platform by 180 years.
• CANDY: The first troll was a 19th-century newspaper editor who insulted seven rival papers in one issue — an easy conversational hook.