In its 20th-century heyday, the Daily News was America’s first successful tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1919 as the Illustrated Daily News, it attracted readers with sensational coverage of crime and scandal, lurid photographs and cartoons. Its circulation grew from 1520,000 in its first few months to 2,000,000 by 1930, the highest circulation of any newspaper in the United States at that time. The newspaper became a daily in 1929, and was named the New York Daily News.
In recent years the paper has struggled, especially as print sales have declined and digital ads have taken a larger share of advertising revenue. The paper is currently owned by Tribune Publishing, which acquired it in 2017. The company has been cutting costs and staff in an attempt to save the newspaper. In May, the News laid off a quarter of its newsroom staff and closed two foreign bureaus.
Almost all the News’s online content is published on its website, which is also where most of its social media activity takes place. Its website receives about 4 million visitors a month and has an average monthly time on site of more than 12 minutes. Its most popular articles are about city politics and current events, although it also publishes investigative reports on local issues such as a lawsuit filed by the city against the owner of a homeless shelter, as well as features such as celebrity gossip and sports updates.
About one-in-five of the News’s YouTube channels are oriented around an individual, typically a television or radio personality such as Tom Hartmann or Mike Huckabee. This balance is unusual among channels affiliated with a news organization, where only about one-in-ten are personality-driven.
Most of the News’s YouTube videos are neither positive nor negative in tone – 69% of them take a neutral or mixed stance toward the main subject of the video. However, negative videos outnumber positive ones by about five-to-one. Roughly one-in-five (22%) of these videos focused on Trump and his impeachment proceedings, while 3% of the news videos took a more general focus on domestic issues or other topics.
The News is one of the oldest and most prominent newspapers in the United States. In its early decades, it had a reputation as a brawny metro tabloid that dug into crime and corruption, a model that helped give rise to the Daily Planet, the fictional tabloid of Superman and Lois Lane in the 1994 movie “The Paper.” The News’s original headquarters at 450 West 33rd Street straddled the railroad tracks into Pennsylvania Station. The paper later moved to a larger office building on Manhattan’s West Side. In 2011, it relocated downtown to an office tower formerly occupied by its competitor, The New York Post. The News is a founding member of the Yale Daily News Historical Archive, which holds digital copies of the paper from 1996 to the present. The Archive was made possible by an anonymous gift from a Yale College alumnus.