A daily news is a publication that contains current events and information of general interest to the public. Daily newspapers typically feature politics, business, sports, and culture in addition to reporting on local and international affairs. A number of different types of daily publications exist, including traditional newspaper formats and online-only newspapers. The most prominent example is the New York Daily News, a morning tabloid once ranked as the highest-circulation newspaper in the United States.
The Yale Daily News (YDN) is an independent college newspaper founded on January 28, 1878, that publishes Monday through Friday during the academic year at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The News is the oldest continuously published daily student newspaper in the United States, and it continues to be financially and editorially independent. Many YDN alumni have gone on to have successful careers in journalism and public life, including William F. Buckley, Lan Samantha Chang, John Hersey, Joseph Lieberman, Sargent Shriver, and Strobe Talbott.
In 1975, the Daily News rolled out what would become its most famous headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”—a reference to President Gerald Ford’s veto of a bankruptcy bailout for New York City. The story was a major factor in the President’s loss of the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. From this point forward, the News shifted from a staunchly conservative stance to a more flexible centrist one.
As the newspaper began to grow in size and reputation, its owner, Joseph Medill Patterson, sought to expand beyond the pages of his flagship publication, the Chicago Tribune. In 1919, he purchased the New York City newspaper the Illustrated Daily News and launched the New York Daily News in 1921. The paper quickly attracted readers with sensational coverage of crime and scandal, lurid photographs, and cartoons, becoming the first successful American tabloid newspaper.
By the 1930s, the Daily News was among the largest papers in the world, with a circulation of over 2,000,000 copies a day. Its success prompted the Tribune Company to establish sister newspapers in other cities, including the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Daily News was also the first newspaper to publish a color supplement, BET Weekend, in 1996, and it is still the only major city newspaper to maintain an online presence.
In the 1990s, publisher Mort Zuckerman made several big changes to the newspaper to rediscover its earning potential and reposition it as a serious tabloid. He invested $60 million in color presses, allowing the News to match the visual quality of USA Today, the biggest newspaper in the country at the time. He also launched the quarterly—later monthly—insert BET Weekend, which became the most widely circulated magazine in America for African Americans. By the end of the decade, however, labor costs were swallowing 44 percent of the News’s revenue and causing it to lose money in every quarter. In 1995, the News moved from its Park Place headquarters to a single floor of 5 Manhattan West.