One recent Friday morning I picked up both of New York’s tabloids. The contrast was instructive.
The Daily News featured a grotesque murder on the front page. Inside was a mixture of local political news, more crime, and a smattering of national and international coverage from The Associated Press. The New York Post led with a goofy photo of state attorney general Letitia James, who — at least according to a whistleblower — had pursued a prosecutorial crusade against Donald Trump despite having no evidence. That was followed by page after page of celebrities, MAGA-friendly content zeroing in on familiar targets like Abdul El-Sayed, and manufactured outrages such as the rising price of Halloween candy and private-school teachers who must be getting paid too much because they wear expensive clothes.
As for which formula is more successful, that was settled a long time ago. The Daily News on the day I looked at it comprised 48 pages, whereas the Post was a relatively robust 68. The News’s print circulation is a paltry 29,000 on weekdays and 48,000 on Sundays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The Post’s: 112,000 on weekdays and nearly 125,000 on Sundays. But in this post-print era, it’s online where the comparison is the starkest. The Daily News’s website receives fewer than 5 million visits each month, reports the analytics firm SimilarWeb. The Post, meanwhile, has grown into a behemoth, with nearly 96 million visits a month — good for a spot in the top 10 among news websites, says Press Gazette, a British-based publication that reports on digital journalism.
The story of how the Daily News grew into a phenomenon only to fall apart at the hands of cultural and demographic change, bad ownership, and more nimble competition is told by Matthew Pressman in “The People’s Paper: The Rise and Fall of the New York Daily News,” a history of the News from its founding in 1919 to its current enfeebled state. Pressman, an associate professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, has written a rollicking tale that’s loaded with details ranging from the significant to the merely entertaining. It was all I could do to refrain from dog-earing and taking notes on every one of its 250 pages.
