Publisher Tronc acquires Daily News, storied NY tabloid

Tronc (Photo: troncmedia/Facebook)

NEW YORK — Newspaper publisher Tronc has acquired the Daily News, a storied New York tabloid newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize this year but has been buffeted by the changing media environment.

Chicago-based Tronc Inc., the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, announced the deal Monday night, and the Daily News posted a story on its website.

Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn said acquiring the paper and its popular website would “provide us with another strategic platform for growing our digital business, expanding our reach and broadening our services for advertisers and marketers,” and both Tronc and Daily News executives said the company would maintain the quality of the paper’s journalism.

“Over the past near-century, the New York Daily News has served New York City and its surrounding areas with its award-winning journalism and helped shape the dynamics of the city,” News owner Mort Zuckerman said in a release. A New York real estate magnate, he had owned the paper since 1993.

The deal puts the Daily News under the umbrella of one of the nation’s major newspaper chains, with properties spanning from the Hartford Courant in Connecticut to the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida.

Tronc — which evolved from Daily News founder the Tribune Co. — gets a presence in the New York media market, a news site with about 25 million unique monthly visitors and other assets. Under the terms of the deal, Tronc said it assumed the Daily News’ operational and pension liabilities and got 100 per cent ownership of its Jersey City, New Jersey, printing plant and a 49.9 per cent interest in the plant’s 25-acre (10-hectare) property, which overlooks the Manhattan skyline.

With the deal, News Editor-in-Chief Arthur Browne was also named publisher, though he plans to retire at the end of the year.

Founded in 1919, the Daily News considers itself “New York’s Hometown Newspaper,” informing everyday New Yorkers about their city and more. It has been known over the years for zesty headlines — perhaps most notably “Ford to City: Drop Dead” during the New York’s financial woes in 1975 — gossip, city coverage and star columnists that included Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Liz Smith.

Lately, the tabloid has also attracted attention with its unsparing criticism of President Donald Trump. (Trump, in return, branded the paper “worthless” and Zuckerman “dopey” in tweets last year.)

The Daily News and ProPublica together won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism for uncovering how authorities used an obscure law to evict hundreds of people, mostly poor minorities, from their homes. It was the Daily News’ 11th Pulitzer Prize, and the fifth during Zuckerman’s tenure.

But the paper has also contended with the shifts in news consumption and advertising that have affected newspapers in general in the digital age. The newspaper industry has been suffering for years from declining print circulation and advertising revenue, as readership and ad dollars have shifted online. Online ad sales have increased for newspaper companies, but not always enough to offset the decline in print revenue.

The Daily News also grappled with a muscular hometown tabloid rival, the News Corp.-owned New York Post.

Zuckerman eyed selling the Daily News in 2015 but ultimately took it off the market.