Daily News is the name of a daily newspaper founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson and a subsidiary of the Tribune Company. The first successful tabloid in the United States, it quickly established itself as one of America’s most popular newspapers with its sensational coverage of crime and scandal, lurid photographs, and reader contests and cartoon strips. Its smaller size made it easy to handle on the subway system, where it found many of its early readers.
By the end of the Roaring Twenties, the Daily News had become the largest newspaper in the country. Its success can be attributed in part to its extensive use of photography, which was an important asset in the newspaper business at that time. It also capitalized on a public appetite for scandalous and titillating stories, such as the Teapot Dome Scandal and Wallis Simpson’s romance with King Edward VIII that led to the latter’s abdication. The paper was also an early user of the Associated Press wirephoto service and developed a significant staff of photographers.
Despite the success of the Daily News, it experienced a series of financial setbacks throughout the decades. The onset of the Great Depression and World War II slashed its advertising revenue, which was already suffering from competition from television and other media outlets. The paper was also battered by a multi-month union strike, which left it with fewer than half of its previous staff.
In the ’70s, the Daily News began to see some signs of recovery, and circulation rose again. But the company’s long-time publisher, Robert Maxwell, was in ill health and attempting to consolidate his media empire. He offered to buy the Daily News, but the paper’s ten unions responded by going on a 147-day strike. The Daily News was able to continue publishing with non-union replacement staff, but at a high cost.
The ’80s brought further financial difficulties for the newspaper, and in the ’90s it began to lose ground to online competitors. By 2017, the Daily News’s circulation had halved again, and its former owners (at that point called Tronc) purchased the paper for the symbolic sum of $1. Tronc immediately embarked on a firing spree, culling nearly all of the newspaper’s editorial staff.
Today, the Daily News is a morning tabloid that covers current affairs in New York City and across the globe. The paper also features entertainment and sports news, as well as classified ads and a comic section. It has a special focus on the community of Yale students, including Yale-Harvard Game Day and Commencement issues, as well as quarterly inserts for African Americans and Caribbean Monthly. The News also publishes several special issues each year celebrating Yale’s indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian American communities in partnership with the university’s cultural centers and student groups. It is the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States.