Founded in 1919 as the Illustrated Daily News, it became the first successful tabloid newspaper in the United States. The Daily News drew readers with sensational coverage of crime, scandal and violence, lurid photographs, classified ads and cartoons. The paper was a model for the tabloid depicted in the 1994 film The Paper and has won Pulitzer prizes for commentary and feature writing. The New York City-based Daily News is owned by Tribune Publishing, now known as Tronc.

The New York Daily News has a liberal to moderately left media bias and is often contrasted with its conservative rival, the New York Post. It was once a major Democratic Party newspaper, but since the 1970s it has been largely independent. The News has also won several awards for investigative journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1992.

A tabloid, the Daily News focuses on local and national news stories, but it is best known for its outrageous headlines and inflammatory coverage of controversial issues such as drugs, crime, race, religion and politics. In addition, it publishes celebrity gossip, classified advertisements and comics. The paper is based in New York City and has bureaus in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens and within One Police Plaza.

In its 20th century heyday, the New York Daily News was a brawny metro tabloid that thrived on digging into crime and corruption. It was a source of inspiration for the more famous Daily Planet, counted Clark Kent and Lois Lane among its reporters and won Pulitzer Prizes for commentary and international reporting. The Daily News has continued to publish, but its circulation is much lower than it was in its heyday.

The Yale Daily News Historical Archive provides access to digitized copies of printed issues of the newspaper. The archive contains more than 140 years of YDN reporting and is open to the world. This archive was made possible by an anonymous gift to the library.

New York Daily News staff members are bracing for a new wave of layoffs in a company that is under the control of a cost-slashing hedge fund. The newspaper’s publisher, Chicago-based Tribune Publishing, has been offering buyouts and imposing furloughs, as well as cutting salaries and benefits. The slashing has prompted workers at several of the company’s newspapers to call for local benefactors to save them.

As of October 2017, the Daily News is still in business, though its print version has been reduced to a small number of pages. The website has a larger audience, and it is available in a variety of formats. The newspaper has a reputation for sensationalism, and its writers strive to be ahead of their competitors in breaking stories.

The New York Daily News has an AllSides Media Bias Rating of Left, meaning that its coverage leans more toward liberal thought and policy agendas than that of the right-wing Post. This is not an endorsement of the Daily News, but a warning to its readers that it may not represent all perspectives on important stories.