New York Daily News

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1928, a reporter working for the Daily News strapped a small camera to his leg inside an execution chamber. He captured a photograph of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. The next morning's front page carried a single word: "DEAD!" That image became one of the most talked-about front pages in American newspaper history. It captures something essential about a paper built on photographs, punchy headlines, and a willingness to shock.

  But the story behind that photograph raises harder questions. How did a newspaper that nearly folded in its first year survive to become one of the country's most widely circulated dailies? Who kept it running through a publisher's death, a bankruptcy, and repeated changes of ownership? And how did a paper so tied to New York's streets end up printing its pages across the river in New Jersey?

• 2. Born From a Rivalry

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  Joseph Medill Patterson and his cousin Robert R. McCormick ran the Chicago Tribune together as co-publishers, both grandsons of Tribune Company founder Joseph Medill. The two could not agree on the editorial direction of that paper. At a meeting in Paris, they settled on a solution: Patterson would build a new, Tribune-owned paper in New York.

  On his return to New York, Patterson met with Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, publisher of the British Daily Mirror. Its success as a tabloid convinced him the format could work in America. He launched the paper on the 24th of June 1919, under the name Illustrated Daily News. It became the first daily newspaper in the United States printed in tabloid format. An earlier paper had used the name New York Daily News, but it shut down in 1906 and shares no connection to Patterson's tabloid.

  Its circulation numbers within the first few months would test whether the gamble could survive at all.

• 3. Circulation Wars and Symbols

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  By August 1919, two months after its debut, the paper's daily circulation had fallen to just 26,625 copies. New York's subway commuters, though, took to the tabloid's compact size, and readership climbed steadily. By the paper's first anniversary in June 1920, circulation had passed 100,000. By 1925 it topped a million. By 1947 it reached a peak of 2.4 million copies on weekdays and 4.7 million on Sundays.

  From 1920 to 1991, the paper carried the slogan "New York's Picture Newspaper," reflecting its heavy use of photographs. A camera has appeared in the paper's logo since its first issue. In 1942, it became one of the first New York papers to hire a woman as a staff photographer, Evelyn Straus. A 1985 ad campaign produced its later slogan, "New York's Hometown Newspaper," while another line used at times was "The Eyes, the Ears, the Honest Voice of New York."

  Reporters in the field once relayed information to the newsroom over two-way radios, broadcasting on 173.325 megahertz under the call sign KEA 871. They worked from a fleet the paper called "radio cars." Sports cartoonists Bill Gallo, Bruce Stark, and Ed Murawinski built the paper's reputation for sports coverage, alongside columnist Walter Kaner and editorial cartoonist C. D. Batchelor. In 1948, the paper launched television station WPIX, channel 11, and later added a radio station that became WFAN-FM. Tribune took full ownership of WPIX in 1991, and Emmis Communications bought the radio station in 1997. The paper briefly ran an afternoon edition, Daily News Tonight, from the 19th of August 1980 to the 28th of August 1981. It competed with a morning edition the New York Post had launched in 1978. A citywide newspaper strike hit New York from the 10th of August to the 5th of November 1978. It shut down the News along with the city's two other major dailies, and no editions were printed during that stretch. The paper also published a Sunday edition, Sunday News, until 1977.

  Keeping the presses running took more than good slogans, and the paper's owners were about to find that out the hard way.

• 4. Brushes With Collapse

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  In 1982, the Tribune Company, the Daily News's owner, put the tabloid up for sale as it neared collapse. Nearly a decade later, during a newspaper strike in the early 1990s, the paper again came close to folding. In 1991, millionaire publisher Robert Maxwell offered financial assistance to keep it running. During his short time as publisher that year, the paper occasionally issued extra afternoon "P.M. Editions." When Maxwell died later that year, the News broke away from his publishing empire, which splintered soon after amid doubts about his finances. Editor James Willse held the paper together through bankruptcy, buying it from the Tribune Company and becoming interim publisher. Mort Zuckerman bought the Daily News in 1993, the same year the Tribune-owned News Syndicate Company ended its long run publishing the paper.

  In January 2012, former News of the World and New York Post editor Colin Myler took over as editor-in-chief of the Daily News. His deputy, Jim Rich, replaced him in September 2015. That same year, the paper closed its longtime local bureaus in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, ending a period when staff focused on individual boroughs. Around that time, the Daily News ranked as the ninth-most circulated daily newspaper in the country; by 2019, it had slipped to eleventh.

  On the 4th of September 2017, Tronc, the renamed Tribune Publishing, announced it had acquired the Daily News for just $1. The deal included the paper's operational and pension liabilities. By then circulation had fallen to 200,000 copies on weekdays and 260,000 on Sundays. In July 2018, Tronc cut half of the paper's editorial staff, including editor-in-chief Jim Rich. Robert York, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Tronc-owned Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, replaced him. The cuts also eliminated the paper's social media team, and images from its Twitter feed were later deleted. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed staff to remote work, the Daily News closed its newsroom in Lower Manhattan.

  Tribune Publishing itself was acquired in May 2021 by Alden Global Capital, which also owns the news publisher Digital First Media. The Daily News was transferred to a new Alden-owned company, Daily News Enterprises. Editor Robert York left in September 2021 and was replaced on an interim basis by Andrew Julien, who also edits and publishes the Hartford Courant. Departures continued after Alden took over; over three months in 2022, twelve reporters resigned, representing one-fifth of the newsroom staff.

  Long before Alden ever took over, the paper's opinion pages were already choosing sides in presidential elections year after year.

• 5. A Shifting Editorial Voice

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  New York Times journalist Alan Feuer described the Daily News's approach as "deep sourcing and doorstep reporting." He said the paper delivers city-centered crime coverage and hard-hitting reporting on public issues, rather than filtering news through a partisan lens. According to Feuer, the paper built its identity on "speaking to and for the city's working class" and on "its crusades against municipal misconduct." The New York Times has also called the paper's editorial stance "flexibly centrist," with a "high-minded, if populist, legacy."

  Unlike its sister paper the Chicago Tribune, the Daily News backed Franklin D. Roosevelt, endorsing him in 1932, 1936, and 1940. It broke with him in 1941 over foreign policy. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the paper pushed a conservative populist line. By the mid-1970s, its stance began shifting. During the 1990s, it gained a reputation as a moderately liberal alternative to the more conservative New York Post. That paper had leaned Democratic until 1980.

  It backed Republican George W. Bush in 2004 and Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. Then came Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. The endorsements swung by candidate more than by party.

  That same opinionated paper has called several different buildings home over the past century, starting just steps from City Hall.

• 6. From City Hall to Jersey City

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  The paper's first home stood at 25 City Hall Place, just north of City Hall and near Park Row, long the center of the city's newspaper trade. In 1921, it moved a short distance to 23 Park Place after outgrowing its original cramped offices. From 1929 to 1995, it worked from 220 East 42nd Street, a landmark building near Second Avenue designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.

  That 42nd Street building still stands and is still known as the News Building, complete with its giant globe and weather instruments in the lobby. It served as the model for the Daily Planet building in the first two Superman films. Former subsidiary WPIX-TV still occupies the building today, which is now the world headquarters of the Associated Press as part of Manhattan West. The paper itself moved to 450 West 33rd Street, also called 5 Manhattan West, in 1995. That building straddled the railroad tracks leading into Pennsylvania Station.

  In June 2011, the paper moved its operations to two floors at 4 New York Plaza in lower Manhattan. Sixteen months later, Hurricane Sandy's flooding severely damaged the building and made it uninhabitable. Staff worked from temporary locations, including office space at the Jersey City printing plant. In early 2013, the paper rented space at 1290 Avenue of the Americas near Rockefeller Center. That spot sat four blocks from rival New York Post. The paper returned to its permanent 4 New York Plaza offices in early November 2013, then closed its Manhattan headquarters altogether in August 2020.

  In 1993, the Daily News consolidated its printing operations near Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 2009, it spent $150 million on new printing presses as part of a shift to full-color photographs. Two years later, the company spent another $100 million on three additional presses, funded in part by a $41.7 million Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit from the state. In 2022, the company planned to close that Jersey City plant and outsource its printing to North Jersey Media Group.

  That plant's closure would end an era for a paper whose journalism, not its presses, has produced its most enduring prizes.

• 7. Eleven Pulitzers

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  The Daily News has won eleven Pulitzer Prizes over its history. In 1998, columnist Mike McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for a multi-part series, published in 1997, on Abner Louima, who was sodomized and tortured by New York City police officers.

  In 2007, the paper's editorial board, made up of Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub, and Heidi Evans, won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Their series of thirteen editorials ran over five months. It detailed how more than 12,000 rescue workers who responded to the September 11 attacks had grown ill from toxins in the air. The Pulitzer citation praised the board's work, saying the prize was given "for its compassionate and compelling editorials on behalf of Ground Zero workers, whose health problems were neglected by the city and the nation."

  In 2017, the Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service alongside the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. The prize recognized work led primarily by reporter Sarah Ryley uncovering widespread abuse of eviction rules, which police used to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities.

  Serious investigative journalism, though, was never the only side of the paper's identity. Its front page had another gear entirely, built for moments that called for a single unforgettable line.

• 8. Headlines That Made News

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  Like its rival the New York Post, the Daily News built a reputation for puns splashed across its front and back covers.

  On the 29th of October 1975, President Gerald Ford gave a speech ruling out federal aid to save New York City from bankruptcy. The next day's Daily News front page read "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." Ford later said the headline played a role in his loss in the 1976 presidential election.

  On the 16th of November 1995, the front page showed an illustration of Newt Gingrich as a baby in a diaper, under the headline "Crybaby." The image followed revelations that Gingrich had shut down the federal government after feeling snubbed by Bill Clinton aboard Air Force One.

  On the 12th of May 2003, the front page read "JFK Had a Monica," reporting on historian Robert Dallek's book about John F. Kennedy's affair with a White House intern. The affair had taken place five years before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal became public. The coverage pushed the former intern, Mimi Alford, to come forward. A follow-up front page on the 16th of May read "Mimi Breaks Her Silence," and another the next day was headlined "JFK & MIMI: Why It Matters." In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the paper's headlines grew more provocative and its editorials more opinionated. That shift helped boost its profile in the city's media market.

  After the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, in which 14 people were killed, the front page read "God isn't fixing this." It paired that headline with images of tweets from Republican politicians offering thoughts and prayers. The paper argued against what it called "empty platitudes and angry rhetoric" and called instead for action "in response to the ongoing plague of gun violence in our country." The headline drew both praise and criticism. In January 2016, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas disparaged "New York values" during a primary debate. The paper responded with a cover reading "DROP DEAD, TED," alongside an image of the Statue of Liberty raising its middle finger.

  On the 20th of December 2016, Daily News columnist Gersh Kuntzman compared two assassinations. He likened the killing of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, to a different assassination. Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath had been killed by Jewish student Herschel Grynszpan. Kuntzman wrote that "justice has been served." Since 2018, the Daily News has blocked internet users in the European Union from accessing its website, citing missing data protection compliance.