The New York City newspaper market used to be crowded with papers. Most of them are long gone. At the top end are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal targeting somewhat different readerships. On the more working class scale are the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Both tabloids target a working class readership. The Post became a conservative publication after a brief crisis, though it retained its basic identity, and the Daily News was the more reliably Democrat paper.
In past years, the Daily News transformed into a hatefilled collection of bile. It was no longer just a Democrat alternative to the Republican post. It didn't just bring radical leftists like Shaun King on board. Instead its range of people, from sports columnist Mike Lupica to former Post film critic Linda Stasi transformed themselves into cartoonish version of HuffPo bloggers.
Linda Stasi managed to hit an incomprehensible low and cause a boycott of the Daily News when she insisted that a victim of the Muslim San Bernardino terrorists was just as bad as the killers.
Stasi's ugliness, the barrage of trolling covers, didn't win the Daily News more readers. Instead it alienated them. The tabloid's readership had always trended toward Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island working class people. They enjoyed the tabloid style and had little interest in being subjected to daily, deranged hysteria of the kind that is lapped up by liberals at the Huffington Post.
And so a change had to come.
The previous editor, Jim Rich, had been resisting pressure from management to soften the Trump covers, people familiar with the matter said. He was told they were diminishing an already much diminished print subscriber base, these people said, particularly among blue-collar readers in certain corners of New York’s outer boroughs, where Trump’s nationalistic populism apparently resonates in a way that is anathema to the city’s cosmopolitan districts and immigrant enclaves...
Now, many News staffers and alumni feel like the air has been sucked out of the room, and they are perhaps coming to terms with the notion that Trump is more popular with segments of their readership than they thought, even in deep blue New York.
“The dissent is probably close to unanimous,” one insider told POLITICO.
That's because the Daily News has been hollowed out. It no longer speaks to New Yorkers. It no longer has any kind of identity or ethical code. Or Linda Stasi's rant attacking a terror victim would never have been printed. The tabloid needs airing out the way the Post did during the ownership crisis.
Starting in the summer, however, Rich began hearing complaints from management, according to sources familiar with the matter. They said he was asked to dial down the Trump fronts because they were costing the News subscriptions in places like Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Politico's coverage predictably bemoans the situation. It doesn't mention ugliness like Linda Stasi's shameful attack on a terror victim. But the Daily News is up against an inevitable problem.
Print is in decline. The readers who "like" News covers on Facebook are not the ones subscribing to the paper. Or probably even reading it online on a regular basis. Chasing social media buzz is no substitute for building up a newspaper.
The Daily News is not the first paper to learn that the hard way. Its demographic is white working class. It's more conservative and is not especially interested in the paper's gun control crusade, a predictably British editorial legacy, let alone its pandering to left-wing millenials. The reinvention of the Daily News failed miserably.