July 17, 2025

The Daily News Is Now a Newspaper Without a Newsroom

“We’ve hung all the awards we’ve been given, all the photos of our dead colleagues,” said Danielle Ohl of The Capital Gazette. Recounting the temporary newsroom the staff went to after the shooting and then the new newsroom that was closed Wednesday, she added, “It felt like we finally had somewhere we know we will be, and we can move forward. And now we have to leave again. And not only are we leaving, but we’re leaving with nowhere else to go.”

Jen Sheehan, of The Morning Call, reflected on the coronavirus-imposed status quo. “Nobody wants to be home,” she said. “You get a lot out of being around your co-workers, both personally and how you report. We’re going to lose all of that.”

In its 20th-century heyday, The Daily News was a brawny metro tabloid that thrived when it dug into crime and corruption. It served as a model for The Daily Planet, the paper that counted Clark Kent and Lois Lane among its reporters, and for the tabloid depicted in the 1994 movie “The Paper.” It has won Pulitzer Prizes in commentary, feature writing and even international reporting.

The longtime home of the columnists Jimmy Breslin, Dick Young and Liz Smith, The Daily News reveled in its role as the voice of the average New Yorker. Etched into the stone above the entrance of its former home, the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, is a phrase attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them.”

“The attitude of The News was always: A tabloid is smarter than a broadsheet,” said Michael Daly, who began there as a general-assignment reporter in 1978, and was later a city columnist. “It gets to the essence of things. It doesn’t talk down to people, it talks to them eye to eye.”

Last fall, The Daily News had the 18th-highest weekday circulation of newspapers in the United States, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

But it has been in financial trouble for decades. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the New York real estate developer and media mogul, bought the paper out of bankruptcy in 1993. He sold it to Tribune Publishing, then known as Tronc, in 2017 for $1. (That is not a misprint.) Even so, The Daily News won (with ProPublica) the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that same year, for uncovering New York Police Department abuse of eviction rules.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/business/media/daily-news-office.html

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