The Daily News
If you’re looking for the best in New York city news and politics, no other tabloid has the reputation of Daily News. The newspaper’s award-winning writers and columnists bring you live coverage of national and local news, as well as all the gossip and entertainment that is uniquely New York. No one covers the Yankees, Mets, Giants and Jets like the Daily News.
Founded in 1919 as the Illustrated Daily News, the Daily News became the first successful tabloid newspaper in the United States. Its success was due in large part to its sensational pictorial coverage and its willingness to go one step further than its competitors in the pursuit of a front page headline. It wasn’t uncommon for the paper to print an image of a person mid-electrocution, as in the case of Ruth Snyder, who was sent to the electric chair for killing her husband.
By the end of the 1920s, circulation was exceeding 1.5 million. In 1928, Patterson commissioned Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells—architects of the Chicago Tribune Tower—to design a 36-story freestanding Art Deco building at 220 East 42nd Street that would become known as the Daily News Building. The building was a stark departure from the neoclassical architecture of Park Place and its neighborhood, and some felt that it represented “the brutalization of the city.”
In the 1980s, as the economy tanked and unions gained more power, the Daily News began losing money. In 1986, it was rebranded as “New York’s Picture Newspaper” and dropped its old name, the “Local Daily News”. Despite a successful revival effort, the Daily News lost nearly $1 million in the fourth quarter of 1990, due in part to expensive labor costs.
During this time, the newspaper’s parent company, the Tribune Company, considered selling or closing the paper altogether. The decision was ultimately made to keep the Daily News going, although it was feared that it could never be profitable. The Daily News yielded to union demands over rules, job numbers and overtime, and by the end of the decade, the newspaper was operating at a loss of about a million dollars per month.
In 1993, the Daily News was saved from its financial collapse by publisher Mortimer Zuckerman. He invested $60 million in color presses, allowing the Daily News to compete with USA Today—the largest daily newspaper at the time—in terms of visual quality. He also returned the paper to its roots, focusing on lurid headlines and controversial topics that had earned the News its reputation in the first place. This new approach proved to be successful, and the Daily News was able to maintain its position as the city’s top-viewed newspaper in the early 21st century. However, with the rise of online media and the emergence of Donald Trump as President, the paper’s readership declined. In 2017, it was announced that the Daily News would be sold to Tronc, a media company based in Chicago.