The Yale Daily News Re-Establishes Its Popularity
The Yale Daily News is the nation’s oldest college daily newspaper and has been editorially independent since its founding in January 28, 1878. It publishes Monday through Friday during the academic year and serves both the Yale and New Haven communities. The paper focuses on national and local news, New York City exclusives and politics, as well as gossip and entertainment. Its award-winning writers, columnists and opinion formers are known for bringing the best of New York City to readers, while also exploring issues that affect all of us.
Founded in 1919 as the Illustrated Daily News by Joseph Medill Patterson, the tabloid was the first successful U.S. daily printed in tabloid format and reached its peak circulation in 1947 at 2.4 million copies a day. It was then the eleventh highest-circulation newspaper in the United States. The Daily News remains a powerful force in the newspaper industry, but its circulation has been steadily declining since reaching its peak.
It has been competing with the more traditional New York Times and, later on, its more sensational rival tabloid The New York Post for decades, but it remains one of the most popular newspapers in the country. In the age of the Internet and online media, many print publications have struggled to maintain their readership, and the Daily News has been no exception. By the mid-2000s, its circulation had dipped below half a million for the first time in the paper’s history. But with the emergence and massive public interest in the Donald Trump presidential campaign, the Daily News was able to re-establish itself among the City’s most-viewed media outlets.
As part of its effort to reposition itself, the Daily News went back to its roots, harking back to its more provocative style and tone and rehashing its most famous headline in the direction of the incoming President: “TRUMP TO THE WORLD: DROP DEAD”. This along with a return to its more traditional tabloid layout helped the Daily News regain some of its former luster.
The Daily News has long been renowned for its photographic coverage and a willingness to go further than its competitors in the pursuit of an attention-grabbing front page, including strapping a hidden camera to the leg of Ruth Snyder as she was electrocuted in 1928. The resulting photograph, accompanied by the front-page headline “DEAD!”, remains perhaps the most iconic image in the history of New York journalism.
In the 1980s, the Daily News was beset by financial problems as its parent company, the Tribune Company of Chicago, sought to cut costs. Eventually, ten of the newspaper’s ten unions, which were members of the Allied Printing Trades Council, launched a 147-day strike that almost shut down the Daily News. But the News survived, relying on non-union replacement staff and running at a loss of $1 million a month during the strike. By the early 1990s, the Daily News was a shadow of its 1940s heyday.