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The Daily News has been a part of the American media landscape since its founding in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, who modeled it after the British tabloid, the Daily Mirror. The News was a major contributor to the emergence of tabloid journalism, and the newspaper’s front pages and ad space often featured sensational headlines.
At its peak in the 1940s, Daily News distribution was over 2.4 million daily and 4.7 million on Sundays, making it the nation’s largest paper. The success of the Daily News was attributed to its brassy pictorial coverage and willingness to go one step further than its competitors in search of an attention-grabbing front page story. A prime example was a picture of Ruth Snyder being executed by the electric chair, which drew millions to the paper when it appeared on January 12, 1928.
In the 1990s, Daily News editors built on this reputation for putting the rights of people in the spotlight, including social justice, civil rights and economic equality issues. During this time, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1996 for E.R. Shipp’s pieces on race and welfare and another in 1998 for Mike McAlary’s coverage of police brutality against Abner Louima. The newspaper also built a strong reputation in sports, winning three straight national titles in baseball and two more in football.
By the end of the decade, however, the Daily News was suffering from declining circulation and losing market share to its more sensational rival, the New York Post. In 1993, publisher Mortimer Zuckerman made several big changes, notably investing $60 million in color presses and positioning the paper as a “serious tabloid.” In 1995, the Daily News earned its first annual profit since 1988 and was on its way to reclaiming its status as the city’s leading newspaper.
In 2021, an anonymous Yale College alumnus made a generous gift to the Daily News Historical Archive, which was donated to the Library of Congress as a national collection. The Archive contains 18,848,033 searchable pages from 1919 to 2024. This collection is a valuable source of primary-source information about American culture, history and the events of the times in which it was published. It is available online and can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection and a browser. The New York Times is also digitizing the Daily News archive, which will be added to this collection in the future. These new digital images will allow the public to view and explore America’s most-read historic newspaper, a collection that is incredibly important to our understanding of the United States in the twentieth century. These collections are free and open to the public.