With the increasing success of New Journalism before World War 1, hopes for labour daily papers crystallised. This article speculates on four attempts to counter conservative media as seen through the youthful eyes of Vance Palmer. In London, he participated in the foundation of the successful labour paper the Daily Herald, and he wrote for the British Labour Party daily. Returning to Australia in 1912, he sought to work for a proposed Sydney-based daily paper, and for the successful Queensland’s Labor Daily Standard, as a correspondent. When taking Palmer’s observations into account—drawing on original material from his letters, and set in a context of comparing the four papers—a largely untold story of ambitious design emerges. The scheme of Commonwealth Labor daily newspapers across the nation still lacks its history. Cultural leadership through the commitment of leading men and women, even strike leaders, able to appeal to the passions of writers, editors and readers, and experienced staff utilising an inclusive forum inviting diverse and militant standpoints, may have proved more critical to riding the explosion of radical left idealism in the successful establishment of newspapers, and surviving the suppression of war, than managerial leadership or raising enough economic capital.