There were a lot of them in New York in 1946 and most people read more than one, particularly on Sunday when the funny papers were in color.
The powerhouse was the New York Daily News with a daily circulation of 2.2-million and 4.5-million on Sunday. The closest competition came from Hearst's tabloid the Mirror with less than half the daily and Sunday readership. Close behind was Hearst's afternoon broadsheet the Journal American with about 700,000 readers. The considerable overlap in readership among these three papers hurt the advertising revenue of the News competitors. The liberal tabloid alternative was the Post which had about 250,000 readers.
The prime ad buy to reach upscale readers was The New York Times with about 500,000 daily readers and 1,000,000 on Sunday. Among the afternoon newspapers The World-Telegram had a daily readership of 400,000, the Herald Tribune , the chief competitor to The Times for ad dollars, about 300,000 (but more than twice that on Sunday). The Old Guard favorite was The Sun with about 250,000 readers. Pulling up the rear was the struggling PM, which carried no advertising and was generally considered to have a strong left-wing slant.
The boroughs had their own daily newspapers, notably the Brooklyn Eagle, and there were a number of foreign language dailies as well as those that were aimed at special audiences, like The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Worker and the racing sheets. Because of paper rationing, all of the newspapers had to scale back their size in the early 1940s. Of the mainstream papers. only the News and The Times, with their differentiated readership were financially secure.
The News, Mirror and Journal American editorially were right-wing Republican newspapers, often employing populist rhetoric to support conservative causes. The Times was moderate Democratic while the Herald Tribune spoke for the business, internationalist wing of the Republicans. The World Telegram leaned to the right, the Sun was conservative Republican, the Post was liberal Democrat and PM was left wing.
The Daily News and the Mirror was aimed editorially at the city's blue-collar and clerical workers, most of whom were from "ethnic" backgrounds. The Journal-American appealed to the largely Catholic lower middle class. The World-Telegram and The Sun reflected the interests of white collar suburban commuters and management types, with The Sun's readership perceived as older and stodgier. Many of these readers also skimmed The Times, which was coming to be seen as the ultimate journalistic authority on the news of the day, and read the Herald-Tribune, the voice of the WASP Eastern establishment. The readers of both the Post and PM were largely Jewish, although many working and lower-middle class Jews also read the Mirror for Walt Winchell and the News, along with most everybody else, while the upper middle class Jews and those among them who aspired to it read The Times.
Reading the Sunday papers was a citywide pastime, with many people getting more than one. Having a newspaper delivered rather than picking it up at a news stand was a mark of gentility.
The Mirror