The Daily News is an American tabloid newspaper founded in 1919, the first U.S. daily printed in tabloid format, and once the ninth largest newspaper in circulation in the United States. It was formerly owned by the Tribune Company, but is now published by Tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing). The News was once New York City’s most popular newspaper, and its name is still widely recognized in New York and elsewhere. The paper was known for its intense city news coverage, celebrity gossip and classified ads, as well as a comics section and a sports section. The building that housed the newspaper at 220 East 42nd Street near Second Avenue, an official city and national landmark designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, was modeled for the Daily Planet building in the first two Superman films. The News also once owned WPIX-TV, which remains in the 42nd Street building to this day, and once operated local television stations in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
The Yale Daily News Historical Archive is a collection of every edition of the newspaper since its founding in 1878, including all subsequent issues of the News and its supplements. This archive is maintained by the Yale Library, with support from an anonymous alumnus and additional gifts. The Yale Daily News has been the nation’s oldest college daily newspaper, and alumni have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and public service, including William F. Buckley, Lan Samantha Chang, Joseph Lieberman, John Hersey, Strobe Talbott and many others.
In 2022, the newspaper continued to lose print and online readership as it struggled against a nationwide trend of declining advertising revenue among U.S. newspapers, with the largest newspapers seeing an average decline of 14% in digital audience share and print revenue. The News, like the rest of the industry, has been trying to adapt to a new reality by adopting more local-oriented stories and developing innovative ways of providing them.
This fact sheet is part of an ongoing investigation by Pew Research Center into the state of journalism in the digital age, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. For more on the project, visit here.
We use Comscore data to calculate the combined digital audience of the top 50 U.S. daily newspapers, adjusted for each year to account for changes in the size of the sample. The number of unique visitors is then divided by the number of days in the month to arrive at a daily audience average.
The figures for circulation are through 2014 from the trade group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, now called the News Media Alliance. We used these numbers to create estimates of total circulation for all newspapers, then made adjustments for the size of the sample and the percentage change from the previous year, using a method described in this report by the News Media Center at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.
We use these results to produce annual reports on the state of the local news business and, in particular, the growth of affluent communities as a source of support for quality journalism. These reports are based on an analysis of public financial statements for publicly traded newspaper companies.