mobanmarketNEW YORK, NY – Perched on Manhattan’s far west side, straddling Penn Station’s vast train yards and the crush of traffic headed into the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, the Daily News’ home a decade ago was a reflection of its personality. Though within reach of the corporate glitz and blinding lights of Midtown, the News still had its feet planted firmly among the 24-hour garages that changed the tires of the city’s yellow cabs and the Irish pubs that served the railway workers.
The News prided itself on being up to its neck in the grit of the metropolis. It covered the pomp and celebrity glamor that comes with the greatest city in the world, but its hard-won – and tightly grasped – reputation was as a powerful protector of the city’s little people, a watchdog with a laser focus on greedy or self-centered politicians, unscrupulous landlords, criminals that blighted the streets where its readers lived.
But like the neighborhood it called home, corporate wealth has left the newspaper unrecognizable. Its old headquarters has been swallowed by the Hudson Yards, a towering city-within-a-city with prices as high as its skyscrapers.
And the News, squeezed by the cost of publishing, massive drops in readership and advertising revenue and a new corporate owner obsessed with its bottom line, has been crippled. The newspaper that inspired the Daily Planet is now a Superman on its knees.
Back in the days of 450 W. 33rd St., the home the newspaper moved into in 1995 and left to go downtown in 2011, there was an editorial team hundreds strong at the Daily News. There was a budget to spend on covering big stories the way they needed to be covered. There were bureaus in the boroughs and reporters based in almost every courthouse.
Jumping on planes at the drop of a hat to cover news was expected. Daily News reporters, partnered with photographers, camped out for days at crime scenes. In those not-so-distant days, the news was what investigators discovered, not what they were told by officials.
As of this week, the newsroom staff has dwindled to just 45. There are no bureaus left.
Tronc, the Chicago-based media giant that bought the newspaper in September for $1 and the inheritance of its liabilities, cut the staff in half Monday. But the demise of the Daily News had started a long time before that.
Though layoffs and re-structuring hadn’t been unknown at the newspaper, the first wave of the ongoing bloodletting came in November 2011 when about 20 editorial staff got pink slips. Dozens more went in 2015 as owner Mort Zuckerman trimmed his budget in an effort to make the media enterprise attractive to buyers.
New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio, despite being a common foe of the newspaper, decried its demise Monday and called on tronc to sell the newspaper to somebody who really wanted to cover the city’s news.
But, as Zuckerman had found years earlier, that call is naive. A six-month search for a buyer in 2015 came to an end without a deal. Until tronc stepped forward, nobody wanted to take over the loss-making business.
It’s too soon to tell what Monday’s bloodbath will do to the coverage of New York City. Cutbacks over the past several years clearly had an effect, but the paper’s eye was still on the prize – shown by stellar reporting recently that uncovered a fiasco that left children exposed to lead paint in the city’s massive public housing system.
Nobody realistically expects the Daily News to be the powerhouse it was when 2 million readers picked up a copy every day. Tronc has promised dedication to breaking news about “crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” according to a staff memo. “In our 99-year history, we’ve been through many tough times,” a spokesman said in the newspaper Tuesday.
“We’re not dead yet. Not even close.”
But, with an editorial staff of just 45 highly demoralized people, the patient must be greatly weakened.
Adam Nichols worked as a Staff Writer at the New York Daily News between 2004 and 2008. He is now New York City manager at Patch.com.
Lead image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images