New York Daily News

The New York Daily News is the sixth largest daily newspaper in the United States with a circulation of close to 700,000 in 2006. The paper, the first successful U.S. daily printed in tabloid form, began rolling off the printing presses in 1919 owned by the same family that published the Chicago Tribune. The paper has won several Pulitzer Prizes and is known for its photography and its terse, eye-catching headlines. The Daily News has a long-standing feud with its New York City competitor the New York Post.

History

The New York Daily News newspaper was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert R. McCormick, members of the family that published the Chicago Tribune; from its founding until 1991 it was owned by the Tribune. The Daily News quickly became popular, attracting readers with its photographs, cartoons, and sensational coverage of current events. By the 1930s it had a circulation of over 1,500,000 and reached a peak circulation of two million by the 1940s. The Daily News later established the television station WPIX (Channel 11 in New York City) and radio station WPIX-FM.

At one point in the early 1990s, the Daily News almost went out of business. However, millionaire Robert Maxwell offered financial assistance to help it stay in afloat. When Maxwell died shortly thereafter, the Daily News seceded from his publishing empire, was bought by Mortimer Zuckerman in 1993.

The Daily News carried the well-known slogan "New York's Picture Newspaper" from 1920 to 1991, for its emphasis on photographs, and a camera has been part of the newspaper's logo from day one. The Daily News's current slogan, developed from a 1985 advertising campaign, is "New York's Hometown Newspaper" while another slogan was "The Eyes, the Ears, the Honest Voice of New York." The Daily News continues to include large and prominent photographs, for news, entertainment, and sports, as well as intense city news coverage, celebrity gossip, classified ads, comic strips, a sports section, and an opinion section.

Headquarters

Daily News Building, John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, architects, rendering by Hugh Ferriss. The New York landmark, still standing, housed the paper until the mid-1990s.

From the 1930s to 1990s, the Daily News was based in a landmark skyscraper at 220 East 42nd Street near Second Avenue in New York City, designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood. The paper moved to 33rd Street in the mid-1990s. The 42nd Street location is still known as The News Building, and still features a giant globe and weather instruments in its lobby. WPIX-TV remains in the building, although it now partners with Newsday, as both are owned by the Chicago Tribune.

Editorial opinion

The Daily News is generally seen as politically midway between the two other major New York City dailies, the more liberal New York Times, and the more conservative New York Post, though tending to be more in the direction of liberalism. Typically, it's editorial page espouses a liberal position on social issues like abortion, while advocating more conservative positions on crime and foreign policy, including pro-Israel and anti-Castro editorials and columns.

This was not always the case, as the Daily News, during its partnership with the Chicago Tribune, usually shared the Tribune's staunch conservative viewpoint, while the New York Post was considered a liberal newspaper. The two papers had reversed their ideologies by the late 1970s, largely due to changing city demographics and the purchase of the Post by Rupert Murdoch.

Style and reputation

Though its competition with the New York Post has occasionally led the Daily News to engage in some of the more sensationalist tactics of its competitor, it is still respected in the industry for the quality of its contributors (which past and present have included Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, William Reel, David Hinckley, Mike Lupica, Juan Gonzalez, John Melia, Jami Bernard and Chris Allbritton), its solid coverage of the city, and its photography. Bill Gallo has featured as a prominent sports cartoonist for the paper. Its "Voice of the People" letters section (which often allows letter writers, called Voicers, to respond to other letter writers) is seen as a good way to read the pulse of the city.

Notable front pages

The Daily News' is known for its often colorful and blunt front page headlines, several of which have achieved iconic status. Famous headlines from the Daily News include:

• DEAD! (Picture of the execution of Ruth Snyder, 1928)
• FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD (bankruptcy of New York City government and the refusal of President Gerald Ford to give financial assistance to the city prompted this headline in 1975; the paper nonetheless endorsed him for President the next year)
• TOP COP ADMITS HANKY PANKY (about the marital travails of then-Police Commissioner Ben Ward in 1984)
• BOULEVARD OF DEATH (referring to Queens Boulevard in Queens, where 72 people were killed in traffic accidents between 1993 and 2000)
• CRY BABY (referring to then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 1995, for his shutting down the US government during budget talks)
• THE BOY WHO FOOLED NEW YORK (a 13-year-old boy named Edwin Sabillon who ran away from his home in the Honduras to New York, lying about his mother dying in Hurricane Mitch and going to live with his father in New York. In actuality, his mother abandoned him and his father had died of AIDS months before, which he could not believe. August 31, 1999)
• IT'S WAR (Picture of the second plane going into the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001)
• AIR HEADS (referring to the pilots of a plane that ventured into restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., in May 2005)

Daily Planet

The Daily News served as the model for the Daily Planet in the Superman movies. The paper's front page is a near-perfect match for the real-life Daily News, and the News Building stood in for the Daily Planet Building, with the large globe in the real-life lobby serving as a handy emblem for the Planet.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gatewood, Worth. 1979. Fifty Years of the New York Daily News in Pictures. DoubleDay. ISBN 0385150245
• Squires, James D. 1993. Read All About It!: The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers. Random House.
• Vigilante, Richard. 1994. Strike: The Daily News War and the Future of American Labor Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671796313

External links

• Official website
• Photographic essay on the Daily News Building on 42nd Street

Credits

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