Founded in 1919, the daily news is one of the first tabloid newspapers to attract readers with sensational crime and scandal stories. Its lurid photographs and cartoons, along with intense city news coverage, celebrity gossip, classified ads, and a comics section have become its trademarks. In its early years the paper was strongly conservative, but it has gradually shifted to a moderate-to-liberal position and now competes with the conservative New York Post for readers in the metropolitan area. The daily news is currently owned by tronc, the publishing operations of the Tribune Company. Its headquarters are at 4 New York Plaza in lower Manhattan.
The newspaper was the first to introduce a tabloid format in the United States, and in its initial years it was the biggest newspaper in the country. Its founder, Joseph Medill Patterson, described the newspaper as “a brassy pictorial daily for the whole world” and boasted of its circulation of more than a million.
In the decades after World War II the Daily News led all American papers in both daily and Sunday circulation, and it was a major force in politics for its pro-labor, anti-communist stance. By the 1970s however it began to shift its stance and in recent years it has developed a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal alternative to the conservative Post.
In 1995 the Daily News moved from its traditional home on 42nd Street and Second Avenue to a building at 450 West 33rd Street, designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, which is also the home of the former News subsidiary WPIX-TV. Reduced labor costs and reduced rents enabled the newspaper to return to profitability in 1997, and the daily edition was printed in color for the first time.