For more than 130 years, Daily News has been the primary source of news and debate at Yale. The country’s oldest college daily newspaper, it is editorially and financially independent. The News publishes five days a week during the academic year, in addition to Friday supplements and special issues such as the Yale-Harvard Game Day Issue, the Commencement Issue, and the First Year Issue. The News’ staff members are drawn from the entire Yale community, and many former employees have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and public service, including William F. Buckley, John Hersey, Lan Samantha Chang, Paul Steiger, Sargent Shriver, Calvin Trillin, and Jacob Weisberg.
In the 1980s, the Daily News suffered from a series of labor strikes that resulted in declining circulation, which accelerated once its parent company, the Tribune Company, began to dismantle the paper’s operations. By the end of 1990, labor costs were consuming more than 44 percent of its revenue and had caused a loss of $115 million in just five months. While the Daily News continued to publish by hiring non-union workers, it did so at a substantial loss.
Throughout the 1990s, however, the Daily News regained some of its lost luster under new editors-in-chief (first Pete Hamill and later Debby Krenek). The News developed a reputation for fighting for the First Amendment as well as the rights of the people of New York City—especially those who were perceived to be disadvantaged by the system. This commitment to social justice was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1996 for E.R. Shipp’s pieces on race and welfare, and again in 1998 for Mike McAlary’s coverage of police brutality against Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.
The New York City-based Daily News is currently owned by tronc, the publishing arm of the Tribune Company. The newspaper’s headquarters are at 4 New York Plaza in Manhattan.
Daily News provides a variety of interactive and digital tools to help readers access and explore its extensive content collection. The News also hosts the Daily News Historical Archive, a free online repository of past editions dating back to 1919. Thanks to a generous gift from an anonymous Yale alumnus, the archive has recently been migrated to a more user-friendly platform. This gift allowed the News to add additional years of archives to the database, and will support its ongoing maintenance and preservation. The archive is accessible via the menu to the left. A complete table of contents is also available. All content on the News’ website is copyrighted, and may not be reused without permission. For information about obtaining permission to reuse News content, please visit the YDN Rights and Permissions site.