Founded in 1919, the New York Daily News is the first newspaper to be printed in tabloid format and one of the most widely read newspapers in the United States. It is currently owned by Tribune Publishing, which was acquired by Tronc in 2017. The Daily News was the first newspaper to feature a photo on its front page and remains the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States. The paper is based at the Daily News Building in Lower Manhattan.
Daily News uses a combination of online and in-person resources to cover stories around the world. The paper’s website features a comprehensive archive of articles dating back to 1878, including full-text versions of digitized printed editions and links to audio and video clips. The Daily News also has an extensive social media presence with a Twitter feed, Facebook page and Instagram account. In addition to its website, the Daily News publishes a print version, The New York Times Review, which is delivered free of charge to subscribers.
The newspaper’s staff is also highly active on YouTube, where it produces videos about local and national events and issues. These videos are often accompanied by written articles. In fact, the Daily News has the largest number of YouTube-based news videos of any U.S. newspaper, with over a million total views and more than a dozen top-rated videos.
A majority of these videos focus on events and issues in the United States, although a growing number highlight global events and issues. A small percentage of the Daily News’s videos are about specific people, with the most popular focusing on President Trump (either in the context of his impeachment proceedings or more generally).
For our analysis, we considered whether a video focused on a particular person, organization or topic and used loaded words to influence the audience. While the Daily News often focuses on liberal-leaning topics, it also has a strong record of fact checking and has reasonable political neutrality. Thus, we rate the Daily News as Left-Center biased based on its editorial positions and as High for factual reporting.
To determine how many of these videos included a focus on a person, organization or topic, we studied the metadata attached to each video. We found that 28% of the Daily News’s YouTube videos had a person, organization or topic as the primary focus. This was more than double the rate for independent channels, which focused on these subjects in just 12% of their videos. We attribute this result to the fact that most of the Daily News’s YouTube videos were produced by its news organization, which is likely more focused on current events than independent channels are. Moreover, many of the Daily News’s videos were produced during the height of the Trump era, when the subject of many of its videos was the president and his administration.