It was the first U.S. daily printed in tabloid format. It reached its peak circulation in 1947, at 2.4 million copies a day. As of 2019,[update] it was the eleventh-highest circulated newspaper in the United States. (Today's Daily News is not connected to the earlier New York Daily News, which shut down in 1906.) For much of the 20th century, the paper operated out of the historic art deco Daily News Building with its large globe in the lobby.
The Daily News is owned by parent company Tribune Publishing. This company was acquired by Alden Global Capital, which operates its media properties through Digital First Media, in May 2021.[5][6][7][8][9] After the Alden acquisition, alone among the newspapers acquired from Tribune Publishing, the Daily News property was spun off into a separate subsidiary called Daily News Enterprises.[10]
The Illustrated Daily News was founded by Patterson and his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. The two were co-publishers of the Chicago Tribune and grandsons of Tribune Company founder Joseph Medill.[11] as an imitation of the successful British newspaper Daily Mirror. When Patterson and McCormick could not agree on the editorial content of the Chicago paper, the two cousins decided at a meeting in Paris that Patterson would work on the project of launching a Tribune-owned newspaper in New York. On his return, Patterson met with Alfred Harmsworth, who was the Viscount Northcliffe and publisher of the Daily Mirror, London's tabloid newspaper. Impressed with the advantages of a tabloid, Patterson launched the Daily News on June 24, 1919 as Illustrated Daily News.[11] The Daily News was owned by the Tribune Company until 1993.[12]
The Daily News was not an immediate success, and by August 1919, the paper's circulation had dropped to 26,625.[11] Still, many of New York's subway commuters found the tabloid format easier to handle, and readership steadily grew. By the time of the paper's first anniversary in June 1920, circulation had climbed over 100,000 and by 1925 over a million. Circulation reached its peak in 1947, at 2.4 million daily and 4.7 million on Sunday.[13]
News-gathering operations were, for a time, organized by staff using two-way radios operating on 173.3250 MHz (radio station KEA 871), allowing the assignment desk to communicate with its reporters who used a fleet of "radio cars". Excelling in sports coverage, prominent sports cartoonists have included Bill Gallo, Bruce Stark, and Ed Murawinski. Columnists have included Walter Kaner. Editorial cartoonists have included C. D. Batchelor.
In 1948, the News established WPIX (Channel 11 in New York City), whose call letters were based on the News's nickname of "New York's Picture Newspaper"; and later bought what became WPIX-FM, which is now known as WFAN-FM. The television station became a Tribune property outright in 1991, and remains in the former Daily News Building. The radio station was purchased by Emmis Communications, and since 2014 has been owned by CBS Radio as an FM simulcast of its AM namesake.
The paper briefly published a Monday-Friday afternoon counterpart, Daily News Tonight, between August 19, 1980, and August 28, 1981;[17] this competed with the New York Post, which had launched a morning edition to complement its evening newspaper in 1978.[18] Occasional "P.M. Editions" were published as extras in 1991, during the brief tenure of Robert Maxwell as publisher.[19]
From August 10, 1978, to November 5, 1978, the multi-union 1978 New York City newspaper strike shut down the three major New York City newspapers. No editions of the News were printed during this time.[20]
In 1982 and again in the early 1990s during a newspaper strike, the Daily News almost went out of business. In the 1982 instance, the parent Tribune Company offered the tabloid up for sale. In 1991, millionaire Robert Maxwell offered financial assistance to the News to help it stay in business. Upon his death later that year, the News seceded from his publishing empire which soon splintered under questions about whether Maxwell had the financial backing to sustain it. Existing management, led by editor James Willse, held the News together in bankruptcy; Willse became interim publisher after buying the paper from the Tribune Company. Mort Zuckerman bought the paper in 1993.[12]
In January 2012, former News of the World and New York Post editor Colin Myler was appointed editor-in-chief of the Daily News.[21] Myler was replaced by his deputy Jim Rich in September 2015.[22]
On September 4, 2017, Tronc (now, Tribune Publishing), the publishing operations of the former Tribune Company (which had spun out its publishing assets to separate them from its broadcast assets), announced that it had acquired the Daily News.[25] Tronc had bought the Daily News for $1, assuming "operational and pension liabilities". By the time of purchase, circulation had dropped to 200,000 on weekdays and 260,000 on Sundays.[26] In July 2018, Tronc fired half of the paper's editorial staff, including the editor-in-chief, Jim Rich. Rich was replaced by Robert York, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Tronc-owned The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania.[27] The paper's social media staff were included in the cut; images and memes that were later deleted were posted on its Twitter feed.[28][29]
Its parent, Tribune Publishing, was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May 2021. In September 2021, editor Robert York left and was replaced on an interim basis by Andrew Julien, who also serves as the editor and publisher of The Hartford Courant.[1]
The New York Times journalist Alan Feuer said the Daily News focuses heavily on "deep sourcing and doorstep reporting", providing city-centered "crime reportage and hard-hitting coverage of public issues [...] rather than portraying New York through the partisan divide between liberals and conservatives".[30] According to Feuer, the paper is known for "speaking to and for the city's working class" and for "its crusades against municipal misconduct".[30]
The New York Times has described the Daily News's editorial stance as "flexibly centrist"[30] with a "high-minded, if populist, legacy".[31] In contrast to its sister publication, the Chicago Tribune, the Daily News was pro-Roosevelt, endorsing him in 1932, 1936, and 1940. It broke from the president, however, in 1941 over foreign policy.[32] From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Daily News espoused conservative populism.[33] By the mid-1970s however, it began shifting its stance, and during the 1990s, it gained a reputation as a moderately liberal alternative to the right-wing Post (which until 1980 had been a Democratic bastion).
The newspaper endorsed Republican George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election,[34] Democrat Barack Obama in 2008,[35] Republican Mitt Romney in 2012,[36] Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016,[37] and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.[38]
From its founding, it was based at 25 City Hall Place, just north of City Hall, and close to Park Row, the traditional home of the city's newspaper trade. In 1921 it moved to 23 Park Place, which was in the same neighborhood. The cramped conditions demanded a much larger space for the growing newspaper.[39]
From 1929 to 1995, the Daily News was based in 220 East 42nd Street near Second Avenue, an official city and national landmark designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.[39] The paper moved to 450 West 33rd Street (also known as 5 Manhattan West) in 1995, but the 42nd Street location is still known as The News Building and still features a giant globe and weather instruments in its lobby. (It was the model for the Daily Planet building of the first two Superman films). The former News subsidiary WPIX-TV remains in the building.
The subsequent headquarters of the Daily News at 450 West 33rd Street straddled the railroad tracks going into Pennsylvania Station. The building is now the world headquarters of the Associated Press and is part of Manhattan West.
In 1998, Daily News columnist Mike McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his multi-part series of columns (published in 1997) on Abner Louima, who was sodomized and tortured by New York City police officers.[50]
In 2007, the News' editorial board, which comprised Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub, and Heidi Evans,[51] won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a series of thirteen editorials, published over five months, that detailed how more than 12,000 rescue workers who responded after the September 11 attacks had become ill from toxins in the air.[52] The Pulitzer citation said that the award was given to the paper "for its compassionate and compelling editorials on behalf of Ground Zero workers, whose health problems were neglected by the city and the nation."[52]
In 2017, the Daily News was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in collaboration with non-profit ProPublica "for uncovering, primarily through the work of reporter Sarah Ryley, widespread abuse of eviction rules by the police to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities."[53]
On October 29, 1975, President Gerald Ford gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York City from bankruptcy. The front page of the October 30, 1975 Daily News read: "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD".[55] Ford later said the headline had played a role in his losing the 1976 presidential election.[56]
On November 16, 1995, the Daily News front page displayed an illustration of Newt Gingrich as a baby in a diaper with the headline "Crybaby" following revelations that Gingrich had shut down the government in retaliation for a perceived snub from Bill Clinton aboard Air Force One.[57]
On May 12, 2003, the "Daily News" front page read "JFK Had a Monica", [58][59], reporting historian Robert Dallek's book on JFK's affair with a White House intern---way before the infamous Clinton-Lewinsky scandal just 5 years prior to the publication, and in turn, compelled the former intern, Mimi Alford, to came forward, and then "Daily News" ran another front page title on May 16, 2003, read "Mimi Breaks Her Silence.",[60] and then another article the next day titled "JFK & MIMI: Why It Matters."[61]
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