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When the New York Daily News launched in 1919, it didn’t just sell papers—it reinvented them. Brash, populist, and impossible to ignore, the United States’ first tabloid quickly became the country’s best-selling newspaper, reaching millions of readers and reshaping the way Americans consumed news. The swaggering epitome of big-city journalism, it mixed sensationalist stories about crime and celebrities with in-depth reporting about local and national politics. Yet by the 1970s, the paper was struggling to adapt to changes both in New York City and in how Americans got their news. On top of that, the Daily News faced bruising competition with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, a devastating strike, a shrinking newsroom, and repeated accusations of racism. Somehow, for decades, it weathered these setbacks—until the late 2010s, when the cuts went so deep that they reduced the publication to a shadow of its former self.
Drawing on never-before-cited documents and more than sixty interviews, The People’s Paper tells the story of the Daily News through the eyes of the owners, journalists, and readers who defined it. Matthew Pressman shows how the paper both reflected and shaped the transformations of New York City and American journalism. He argues that tabloids, despite their reputation, were crucial to an informed public, giving ordinary people reliable news in a relatable, digestible way. Lively and definitive, The People’s Paper links the history of the Daily News to today’s crises in media and politics.
— Jeff Jarvis, author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis and Hot Type
A roller-coaster ride through the highs and lows of what was once New York's and America's loudest, brashest, most bombastic trafficker in local news, wild conspiracies, and the grit, gossip, and glitter of a city and its peoples.
— David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
'Tabloid' has long been a shorthand for everything wrong with the American news environment: lowbrow, sensationalistic, trashy. But as Pressman shows in this brilliant new book, the nation’s most popular tabloid served a far more important role—the populist, pugilistic, moral heart of New York’s media. Like the Daily News itself in its heyday, The People’s Paper is essential reading.
— Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans and Messengers of the Right
The People’s Paper reclaims the important history of the tabloid in advancing serious journalism and political commentary, as well as the splashy stories and headlines that made it more well known. Like the newspaper it chronicles, Pressman’s account is lively and entertaining while also rooted in rigorous research that takes seriously an icon of our popular culture and the people who have read it and produced it over the past century.
— Kathryn Cramer Brownell, author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News
Introduction: The Quintessential Tabloid
1. First and Biggest (1919–1939)
2. An Isolationist Paper in a World at War (1939–1946)
3. Might and Right (1946–1966)
4. The Tiger Paper Changes Its Stripes (1966–1980)
5. A Roller-Coaster Decade (1980–1990)
6. Too Tough to Die (1990–1995)
7. Troubles and Triumphs (1995–2009)
8. Traffic, Trump, and Tronc (2009–2025)
Conclusion: The Missing Clock
Notes
Index