The New York Daily News

The News, modeled after the highly successful London picture tabloid, the Mirror, was introduced in 1919, and initially was met with skepticism and even derision by the journalism and advertising elite. With its emphasis on photos, gossip, crime and scandal, the newspaper was thought to appeal primarily to lower-class women. The snobs called it the stenographer's sheet, the gum-chewer's rag, the servant girl’s bible, and the newspaper for morons. Readers complained that the ink from the cheaply produced paper came off on their hands and clothes. Advertisers avoided it other than as a place to run “help wanted” classifieds, assuming its readers had little money to spend. It almost went under in its first few months but, with the help of aggressive contests and promotions, within three years it had the highest circulation in the city, passing the former leaders, the two Hearst broadsheets, the morning Journal and afternoon Tribune. And it kept growing, reaching its circulation peak in 1947. So many advertisers wanted space that the paper turned some away during the wartime paper shortage. The News and The Times were the most financially healthy newspapers at a time when some of their rivals were merging or going out of business.

Some in the city wondered if the paper would survive into the postwar era. Its founder, Joseph Medill Patterson of Chicago's Medill-McCormick-Patterson newspaper clan, who had been ill since November, had exercised such an ironclad control even from his sickbed that it was hard to imagine The News without him. He died in May of liver disease, complicated by pneumonia. While Patterson's cousin, Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, had always been a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, in his youth Patterson had been a Socialist and his paper had a populist streak in its early years, periodically denouncing, with some irony considering its founder's background, inherited wealth and the excessive influence of the rich on politics and society. Patterson had supported FDR in his first three runs at office and at one point considered the president a friend, but Patterson shared his cousin's strong isolationism. As the nation headed increasingly toward war with the Axis powers, Patterson and his paper turned bitterly against FDR, whom they began to to call a dictator, and then rejected the New Deal as wartime economic controls became more rigid. While suspicious of Japan's intentions and supportive of a strong naval defense to protect US interests in the Pacific, Patterson and his editorial lackeys did not see any reason for our country to defend the British Empire, Europe or the Soviet Union against Hitler. This put the paper in line with the America First movement which had the support of a large, vocal minority within the city's Irish-American community with its tribal animosity toward England, the Protestant establishment, Jews and Communists, and bitterness toward the multi-ethnic New Deal coalition and its policies that were a threat to the longstanding Irish-Catholic political, social and cultural dominance in the city. Oddly this interventionist slant also temporarily aligned the paper with the Stalinists who, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, organized protests against "war mongers" until the German invasion of the Soviet Union brought another overnight shift in positions. Since some of the America First movement's most prominent spokesmen, such as the popular radio priest Father Coughlin, evangelical Christian racist firebrand Gerald L.K. Smith, industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, indulged in anti-Semitism, in some cases virulently, many of the city's Jews considered the newspaper an enemy, although many still read the paper, especially on Sundays, if only for the comic strips and the ads. With some reluctance the paper supported the war after Pearl Harbor, but after the war's end it was hostile to the concept of world government as embodied in the UN and was stridently anti-Communist, seeing the One Worlders and the Communists as pretty much one in the same. With the Communists now identified as the primary threat, the newspaper became increasingly interventionist.

By 1946, the News was an institution that reached beyond the paper itself. The lobby of the News building on East 42nd Street, which had a slogan from Lincoln "He made so many of them" carved in black marble over its entrance, was designed to welcome visitors. An information desk dispensed pamphlets on many topics for free or a nominal cost. A travel department supplied road maps marked with individual routes, and including information on road conditions, transportation schedules and hotel rates. Telephone inquiries were answered promptly. The paper had its own weather bureau with meteorological instruments on the roof and recording instruments on the ground floor. Updated weather reports were posted in the lobby but to avoid possible lawsuits from unhappy shippers, the newspaper itself ran forecasts from the U.S. Weather Bureau instead of its own. The News was the only paper with its own city delivery system; its competitors relied on co-op services, although some maintained small fleets of trucks to service the railroad stations and other major distribution points. The "News Around the Clock" broadcast desk had three, eight-hour shifts, which teletyped news to WNEW where the station's announcers read it on air every hour on the half-hour in five-minute, ad-free segments. The News sponsored three major competitive amateur events that routinely sold out Madison Square Garden: the Golden Gloves boxing matches, The Harvest Moon Ball dance contest emceed by Ed Sullivan, the newspaper’s Broadway columnist, and Silver Skates, which included competition for both figure and speed skaters. The profits from these events went to charities.

John Chapman’s Tell It To Sweeney, is an interesting account of the newspaper's history. Chapman was the newspaper's drama critic. He wrote his history in 1961. A less flattering account can be found in An American Dynasty: The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons, by the prominent journalism historian and NYU professor John Tebell, which was published in 1947.