Daily News is an American tabloid newspaper that was the first to attract a mass audience by printing sensational and salacious stories. It was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The new paper was called the Illustrated Daily News and later the Daily News, and it became the first newspaper in the world to sell millions of copies on a regular basis. The tabloid attracted readers with its sensational coverage of crime and scandal, lurid photographs, and cartoons.
In the 1930s, the News was a major early user of the Associated Press wirephoto service and had an extensive staff of photographers. By the end of the Second World War, its distribution reached a peak of 2 million daily and 5 million on Sundays. At the time, it was the country’s largest newspaper. It was also one of the first to publish a celebrity column by Ed Sullivan, who went on to host The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS.
By the 1980s, however, the newspaper was losing money and its circulation had fallen sharply. It was owned by the Tribune Company, and in 1985 its ten print unions began a five-month strike. While the newspaper continued to print with non-union replacement workers, it did so at a significant loss.
The News’s new editor, Mortimer Zuckerman, hoped to revitalize the newspaper by changing its image and making it more serious. He invested $60 million in color presses to allow the newspaper to compete visually with USA Today, the nation’s largest daily newspaper at the time. In addition, he introduced investigative reporting, repositioned the editorial page, and hired a number of top journalists.
These changes helped the newspaper regain some of its lost audience, and it became a strong competitor to rivals such as USA Today and the New York Post. In the late 1990s, the News was on its way to becoming profitable again.
But in recent years, as more people have shifted to digital news consumption, the industry has suffered declining revenue and readership. The Pew Research Center’s Data & Journalism Project explores the state of newspapers, and the trends and patterns that have affected their financial fortunes, subscriber numbers, and website traffic.