The Daily News is the main source of news for students at Yale. It is published Monday through Friday during the academic year and serves the communities of Yale and New Haven. The News features articles on current events, news of interest to the Yale community, and student opinions expressed in editorials and letters. The News also publishes several special issues each year, including the Yale-Harvard Game Day Issue, the Commencement Issue and the First Year Issue. The News is financially and editorially independent from the university.
The News was founded in 1878 and became a daily in 1919. In its early years it was primarily a tabloid. It had a large circulation and a reputation for sensationalism. In addition to its regular news coverage, it ran lurid stories about crime and gangsters, celebrities, and fashion. It also featured gossip, horoscopes, and crossword puzzles.
By the 1950s, however, the newspaper began to shift its emphasis toward politics and national affairs. Editor-in-chief Frank Patterson was convinced that people were no longer interested in “playboys, divorces and their escapades” and wanted to know how they would eat or be safe.
While National Review and other conservative publications propagated a worldview that was intellectual and interventionist, the Daily News insisted on a different approach that was populist and isolationist. It binded its readers into a community based on anti-elitism and white working-class identity.
In addition to its print edition, the News also had a radio station called WPIX and later bought what became WFAN-FM. Despite the fact that it no longer had the highest circulation of any daily in the United States, the News was a leading metropolitan media company and had significant influence in the city.
In the early 21st century, the News was owned by Mortimer Zuckerman and had an editorial staff of about 150 journalists. It was based in the Daily News Building on 42nd Street near Second Avenue, an official city and national landmark designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood. It moved to a new location in 1995, but the building retains its name and is now home to WPIX-TV. The News has since been acquired by Tronc. In this context, the News is often referred to as the “News of New York”. SSW aggregates these individual article scores into a daily time-series measure of news sentiment, using a statistical adjustment to account for changes over time in the composition of the sample. This daily measurement, which is updated weekly, is available on this page. The methodology for calculating this sentiment is explained in detail in Buckman, Adam Hale, Moritz Sudhof and Daniel Wilson., 2020. “Measuring News Sentiment,” FRBSF Economic Letter, Vol. 20-08 (April 6). This daily indicator is constructed from the SSW sentiment scores for the articles cited in this Economic Letter, using a trailing weighted average of time series. This is the same method that is used to calculate the monthly news sentiment indicator for the Daily News.
