Man bites dog (is news)

This was coined by John Bogart (1845-1921) while he was city editor of The Sun newspaper, New York. The full quotation as it appears in The Story of The Sun, by Frank O’Brien, published in 1918, is as follows: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”