Daily News is an award-winning team of reporters, columnists and opinion formers bringing you the best in national and local news from New York City and beyond. Whether you’re looking for intense city news coverage, the latest celebrity gossip, or classified ads, no one does it better than Daily News.
The Daily News’ success in the 1920s can be largely attributed to sensational pictorial coverage, as well as a willingness to go to great lengths for a front-page story (such as when a reporter strapped a camera to the electric chair of Ruth Snyder to capture her mid-electrocution). This approach helped give rise to what would become known as tabloid journalism.
In the late 1980s, the Daily News began to experience financial difficulties. The newspaper’s parent company, the Tribune Company, offered it for sale, but no buyer could be found. Closing the paper was considered, but severance pay and pension benefits would have cost more than $100 million. To cut costs, the News stopped printing at its Park Place offices in 1992 and moved to a single-floor office at 5 Manhattan West.
At the same time, the newspaper was growing its television and radio operations. In 1948, the Daily News established WPIX (Channel 11 in New York), whose call letters were taken from its nickname, and in 1995, it purchased what became WFAN-FM. Both the TV and radio stations remain based in the old Daily News building. In addition, the Daily News started a monthly insert called BET Weekend in 1996, which became a successful nationwide publication.
With circulation at its peak in 1982, the Daily News was a profitable operation with an estimated annual revenue of $115 million. But the newspaper had become more than just a business: It was an institution in its own right, with a loyal readership that loved to read the paper’s signature stories and cherished editorials.
In 1993, a bidding war broke out between The Atlantic owner Mort Zuckerman and Conrad Black, founder of Hollinger Inc., which owned the Chicago Sun-Times and Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Ultimately, Zuckerman won the deal due to contracts he had already successfully negotiated with nine of the paper’s ten unions. The Daily News was sold for $36 million, less than half the price that Black had offered. The newspaper’s management, led by editor-cum-interim publisher James Willse, would go on to publish other papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New Jersey Star-Ledger. They also founded the website Deadspin in 1996, which they sold to The Huffington Post in 2014. The newspaper ceased publishing in 2019.