Founded in 1919, the New York Daily News was the first U.S. daily newspaper to be printed in tabloid format and once had the highest circulation of any paper in the country. It is currently owned by tronc, the publishing operations of Tribune Company, and headquartered at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan. The Daily News was the originator of many popular newspaper innovations, including color photography, front-page local news, classified advertising, comics and a sports section. It has a reputation for liberal-to-moderate bias, often being contrasted with its conservative rival, the New York Post.
The Daily News is available as an online edition and has a mobile app for iOS devices. Its website has a high customer satisfaction rating, according to a recent survey by the independent research firm Consumer Reports. It also has a large social media presence, with more than 11 million likes on Facebook and over 360,000 followers on Twitter.
Readers who subscribe to the Daily News on a print basis receive a free subscription to its digital edition. However, unlike print, online subscriptions are not reflected in print circulation numbers reported to the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). The Daily News and other newspapers that have not provided AAM with data on their digital subscribers have used an industry-standard method to calculate estimated total weekly and Sunday circulation using sales from other sources such as book stores and newsstands.
In addition to its digital products, the Daily News has an extensive advertising and marketing department that offers services such as event marketing, custom content creation, and sponsorship opportunities. The newspaper also has an investigative team that covers the city’s most important stories. In recent years, it has focused on investigating the city’s homicide rates, public schools, and municipal corruption.
Unlike the New York Times and The Washington Post, which have historically not made their digital subscriptions figures available to the public, the Daily News has published this information for several of its digital-only products. This has enabled researchers to make more accurate comparisons between these newspapers and other major digital publications.
This fact sheet is part of a series on the state of journalism in the United States and was compiled by Senior Researcher Michael Barthel and Research Assistant Kirsten Worden. It is based on an ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age funded by The Pew Research Center. For more on this and other projects, please visit our funding page.
The Yale Daily News Historical Archive contains digitized versions of the Yale Daily News, America’s oldest college newspaper, from January 28, 1878 through December 31, 2023. The archive includes articles, editorials and ads from the printed daily edition, as well as special issue editions of the paper that celebrate the heritage of the City of New Haven’s Indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian American communities in collaboration with campus organizations and cultural centers. The newspaper is free to all members of the Yale community and may be read in its entirety online.