For over 130 years, the Yale Daily News has been a primary source of news and debate for the University community. Published every weekday while the school is in session, the News serves as a forum for discussion of current events and issues of public concern. The News staff is composed of undergraduate students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many past editors, writers, and contributors have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and public life. In addition to the daily newspaper, the News publishes a Friday supplement known as WKND, and several special issues each year, including the Yale-Harvard game issue, the Commencement Issue and the First Year Issue. The News is a nonprofit, independently owned and operated student newspaper. For information on reprinting or reproducing News content, please see the YDN Rights and Permissions site.
Founded in 1919, the New York Daily News was the first U.S. daily newspaper printed in tabloid format, and at one point had the highest circulation of any paper in the country. It drew readers with sensational coverage of crime and scandal, as well as celebrity and social intrigue, such as the romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII that led to his abdication. The News also emphasized photography and early on used the Associated Press wirephoto service, building up a team of photographers that would become legendary in their own right. The News’s offices were at Park Place, and in the 1930s publisher Joseph Medill Patterson commissioned Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells to design a 36-story freestanding Art Deco structure that became known as the Daily News Building (and later was used as the model for the Daily Planet building in the Superman movies).
Over the course of the 20th century, the News endured a series of strikes by its labor force that ultimately cost the newspaper up to a million dollars a day. It lost a great deal of readership, too. By the 1970s, the News was struggling to keep up with its muscular hometown rival, the New York Post, and the paper’s flamboyant style began to show its age.
The emergence of digital media and the subsequent decline in print ad revenue has hampered all newspapers, but few more than the Daily News, whose circulation has fallen to less than half a million since its mid-20th-century peak. In 2016, the News took a big gamble, hoping to revitalize its reputation by taking advantage of the massive interest in and coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Its lurid headline, directing the message mainly to Cruz and the future President, was “TRUMP TO WORLD: DROP DEAD.”
The Daily News’s gamble may be paying off. On March 14, 2019, Tronc, the company that acquired the News from Mort Zuckerman in 2017, announced it would take over the publication with a commitment to continuing its high quality journalism. Tronc will assume the Daily News’s financial liabilities and retain ownership of its Jersey City printing plant.