New York Post

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York Post was born in the autumn of 1801 with about $10,000 raised from a circle of investors, and its founder was one of the most consequential men in American history. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, gathered those early backers at Archibald Gracie's weekend villa, a building that would later become the official residence of New York City mayors. Hamilton was a Federalist, alarmed by Thomas Jefferson's election and the swelling popularity of the Democratic-Republican Party, and he wanted a newspaper that could speak for his side. More than two centuries later, the paper he launched still prints every day, making it the oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States.

  What has that paper become? The questions that run through its history are ones about power, money, and the line between journalism and advocacy. Who gets to shape the news? What happens when a single proprietor's business interests and political preferences bleed into the front page? And how does a paper survive, decade after decade, while losing money? The New York Post's story touches all of those questions in ways that are sometimes darkly comic and sometimes genuinely alarming.

• 2. Founding Voices

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  William Coleman was Hamilton's chosen first editor, setting the paper on its initial course as a Federalist broadsheet. The man who gave the paper its intellectual reputation, though, was the abolitionist and poet William Cullen Bryant, whose editorship drew praise from the English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1864. Mill's admiration said something real about how seriously the Evening Post was taken in those decades.

  Bryant's colleague William Leggett brought a different energy to the editorial pages. Leggett held a fierce opposition to central banking alongside strong support for organized labor, and in 1831 he became a co-owner and editor. He ran the paper alone while Bryant traveled in Europe in 1834 and 1835. The paper's ownership during this period was a web of overlapping stakes. John Bigelow, born in Malden-on-Hudson, New York, served as one of the editors and co-owners from 1849 to 1861. Another co-owner, Isaac Henderson, ran a 33-year tenure that ended badly in 1879 when it emerged he had defrauded Bryant throughout that time. Henderson's son had already become publisher, stockholder, and board member, and he sold his own interest in 1881.

  In 1881, Henry Villard took control of both the Evening Post and The Nation, which became the paper's weekly edition. The paper was then managed by a trio: Carl Schurz, Horace White, and Edwin L. Godkin. When Schurz departed in 1883, Godkin became editor-in-chief, and White held that role from 1899 until his retirement in 1903. Control then passed to Villard's son, Oswald Garrison Villard, a founding member of the NAACP and a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League, who had taken over management in 1897.

• 3. A Paper Remade

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  Oswald Villard sold the newspaper in 1918 after widespread allegations of pro-German sympathies during World War I cut into circulation. The buyer was Thomas Lamont, a senior partner at J.P. Morgan and Co., who could not stop the financial bleeding and passed it on to a consortium of 34 financial and reform political leaders headed by Edwin Francis Gay, dean of the Harvard Business School. Franklin D. Roosevelt was among the consortium's members.

  Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publisher of the Ladies Home Journal, bought the Evening Post in 1924 and briefly converted it into a non-sensational tabloid nine years later, in 1933. The paper's name changed and its orientation shifted again in 1934 when J. David Stern purchased it, renamed it the New York Post, and returned it to a broadsheet format with a liberal perspective. Ernest Gruening, who later became a U.S. senator from Alaska, served as an editor for four months in that same year.

  Dorothy Schiff purchased the paper in 1939. Her husband George Backer became editor and publisher. Her second editor and third husband, Ted Thackrey, became co-publisher and co-editor with her in 1942, and together they refashioned the paper into its modern-day tabloid format. Schiff's paper carried some of the most widely read columnists of the era: Drew Pearson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill, Eric Sevareid, theater critic Richard Watts Jr., and gossip columnist Earl Wilson. The Bronx Home News merged with the Post in 1945, and James Wechsler became editor in 1949, running both news and editorial pages before handing the news section to Paul Sann in 1961.

• 4. The Murdoch Era Begins

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  In November 1976, it was announced that Australian media owner Rupert Murdoch had bought the Post from Schiff for US$30.5 million, with the understanding that Schiff would stay on as a consultant for five years. Schiff's paper had grown its circulation by two-thirds, partly by outlasting the competing World Journal Tribune, but rising costs and competition from radio and television had eroded profitability. The paper made money from 1949 until Schiff's final year, when it lost $500,000, and it has lost money in every year since.

  Murdoch brought over the tabloid style he had used in Australian and British papers, including The Sun. The Post became famous for punchy, sometimes grotesque front-page headlines. The headline "Headless body in topless bar", written by Vincent Musetto, was later named one of the greatest headlines by New York magazine in its 35th-anniversary edition; the magazine also included five other Post headlines on its "Greatest Tabloid Headlines" list.

  Federal regulations limiting media cross-ownership eventually forced Murdoch's hand. After he purchased WNEW-TV and four other stations from Metromedia to launch the Fox Broadcasting Company, he was required to sell the Post, which went to real-estate developer Peter S. Kalikow in 1988 for $37.6 million. In 1988, the Post hired Jane Amsterdam, founding editor of Manhattan, inc., as its first female editor. Within six months the paper had toned down its sensationalist headlines. Within a year, Kalikow forced her out, reportedly telling her that "credible doesn't sell." After Kalikow declared bankruptcy in 1993, the paper passed briefly through the hands of Steven Hoffenberg, a financier who later pleaded guilty to securities fraud, and for two weeks through Abe Hirschfeld, who built his fortune in parking garages. A staff revolt followed, capped by a front page showing founder Hamilton's portrait with a single teardrop running down his cheek. Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo and other political officials then persuaded the Federal Communications Commission to grant Murdoch a permanent waiver from cross-ownership rules, allowing News Corporation to repurchase the Post in 1993. Without that FCC ruling, the paper would have closed.

• 5. Circulation Wars and Chronic Losses

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  At peak circulation under the all-day format that followed Murdoch's launch of a morning edition in 1978, the Post reached 962,000 readers, with the morning edition driving most of that growth. Its single-day record was set on the 11th of August 1977, when it sold 1.1 million copies reporting the arrest of David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as "Son of Sam" who had terrorized New York for much of that summer.

  The morning edition brought the Post into direct competition with the Daily News, which retaliated by launching its own PM edition called Daily News Tonight. That evening paper struggled with the same daytime traffic congestion that had plagued the Post's afternoon edition, and the Daily News folded Tonight in 1981.

  The two papers have remained locked in a circulation war since then. Circulation fell from roughly 700,000 in the late 1960s to approximately 517,000 by the time Schiff sold to Murdoch, and has moved up and down in the decades since. The Post surpassed the Daily News in circulation for the first time in October 2006, though the Daily News reclaimed the lead a few months later. In April 2007, the Post reached 724,748, having lowered its cover price from 50 cents to 25 cents to build readership. By 2010 the Post's daily circulation was 525,004, just 10,000 behind the Daily News. Media reports around 2012 suggested that the Post was losing up to $70 million a year. The paper did not post a profit again until September 2022, when it reported a gain for the quarter and year to date, supported partly by a digital network that reached approximately 198 million unique users in June 2022.

• 6. Page Six and Spin-Offs

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  Page Six, the Post's gossip section, began in 1977, created by James Brady and made famous by its blind items. Richard Johnson edited the section beginning in 1985 and held that role for 25 years before British journalist Emily Smith replaced him in 2009. Smith was herself replaced in June 2022 by her deputy, Ian Mohr.

  Beginning with the 2017-18 television season, a daily syndicated show called Page Six TV came to air, produced by 20th Television and Endemol Shine North America. The show was originally hosted by comedian John Fugelsang alongside panelists Elizabeth Wagmeister from Variety and Bevy Smith, with contributions from Page Six and Post writers including Carlos Greer. Fugelsang left in March 2018. When the season ended, Wagmeister, Greer, and Smith were retained as equal co-hosts. In April 2019, it was confirmed that the series would end after May 2019; by that point it ranked last in average viewership among all U.S. syndicated newsmagazine programs.

  The Post also launched the streaming recommendation website Decider in 2014. Its first and only editor-in-chief, Mark Graham, described the site's goal as striking "a nice balance between visual imagery and the written word" while coming "from a place of pop culture omniscience."

• 7. Controversies and Credibility

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  In a 2004 survey conducted by Pace University, the Post was rated the least credible major news outlet in New York, and the only outlet to receive more responses calling it "not credible" than credible: 44% not credible against 39% credible. The Columbia Journalism Review stated in 1980 that the Post was "no longer merely a journalistic problem" but "a social problem, a force for evil."

  The Post's most legally damaging errors have come from incorrect reporting on violent crimes and terrorism. Richard Jewell, the security guard wrongly suspected of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, sued the Post in 1998 for libel; U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska largely denied the Post's motion to dismiss, and the paper later settled for an undisclosed sum. At the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the paper inaccurately reported that twelve people had died and that a Saudi national had been taken into custody. Three days later, on the 18th of April, the Post ran a full-page cover photo of two young men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men", falsely implying they were sought by police. The men, Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, later sued for libel and settled in 2014.

  The paper's 1989 description of five Black and Latino teenagers arrested after an assault in Central Park used language that multiple critics found dehumanizing; the teenagers' convictions were later overturned following the confession of a serial rapist, confirmed by DNA evidence. In 2009, a Sean Delonas cartoon depicting a chimpanzee being shot by police, with a caption linking the animal to the authorship of a stimulus bill, was widely condemned as a racist image targeting Barack Obama. Rupert Murdoch apologized but described the cartoon as aimed only at the legislation. The hip-hop group Public Enemy released a track titled "A Letter to the New York Post" on their 1991 album Apocalypse '91...The Enemy Strikes Back, citing what they described as negative and inaccurate coverage of Black people by the paper.

  In October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, the Post published a front-page story about emails recovered from a laptop said to have been abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The story's named sources were Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and strategy advisor Steve Bannon. Two writers at the Post declined to have their names on it. Gabrielle Fonrouge, listed as a byline, later said she had little to do with the reporting or writing and had not known her name would appear. The other byline was Emma-Jo Morris, a former Fox News producer. Over fifty former U.S. intelligence officials signed an open letter citing deep suspicion of Russian involvement, while also stating they had no evidence of it. Giuliani said he brought the story to the Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it." Twitter temporarily suspended the Post's account over the story, and Facebook limited its spread. In March 2022, The New York Times and The Washington Post confirmed that some of the emails in the story were authentic. Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said in April 2022 that the laptop story was "arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever published."