News is a powerful and enlightening source of information, whether you are following breaking international stories or simply seeking a comprehensive summary of the day’s events. With so many different apps available, there is no shortage of ways to get your daily dose of news, and each one offers its own unique set of features. Some, like the Times’s Need2Know, feature a weekday newsletter that distills the most important stories into pithy summaries (like “What to say when you feel you need WebMD” and “What to say before your family dinner”). Other apps, such as Pulse, use your LinkedIn profile to customize a stream of articles based on your professional interests, and others, including the News, offer an aggregation of must-read news articles and blogs.
In the midst of a tumultuous time for media companies, unionized journalists at The New York Daily News have walked out in protest of cost-cutting measures by Alden Global Capital, which bought the newspaper in 2021. The workers are also concerned about stalled contract negotiations with the company and the potential for layoffs. Unionized reporters at Forbes, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have also walked out in a similar protest, and staffers at Sports Illustrated could potentially face the same fate.
The New York Daily News is the ninth largest circulating newspaper in the United States, with a circulation of about 200,000. The newspaper is known for its large, prominent photographs and intense city news coverage, celebrity gossip, classified ads, a comics section, and a sports section. It has long been a Democratic paper, although in recent years it has shifted toward a more moderate-to-liberal editorial stance. The paper is headquartered in Manhattan at 4 New York Plaza, and its website is at www.dailynews.com.
In a time when local journalism is in trouble, Andrew Conte’s Death of the Daily News offers a poignant exploration of what happens when a newspaper dies in a community. His account of what happened to McKeesport, Pennsylvania—which he frames in terms of the stages of grief—is as thought-provoking as it is informative, and it offers hope for the future of local journalism. The book is well-written and persuasive, even as it sounds the alarm about our nation’s burgeoning “news deserts.”