If you’re not a New Yorker, you probably know the Daily News largely from its desperate trolling covers.
Lately this has involved badly photoshopped pictures of Trump devouring babies while wearing clown makeup supplemented by a Linda Stasi article calling for the murder of all Republicans.
If you’re thinking that this smacks of desperation, you’re right. The Daily News is cutting much of its staff and pivoting to digital. Its long running feud with the New York Post is over.
And the Post won.
(Not that in the long run any paper can or will win.)
But one of the many things that killed the Daily News was its hatred of Trump. Back in the day, it was a working class tabloid. Then it became a shrieky lefty troll while leaving its audience behind.
The previous editor, Jim Rich, had been resisting pressure from management to soften the Trump covers, people familiar with the matter said. He was told they were diminishing an already much diminished print subscriber base, these people said, particularly among blue-collar readers in certain corners of New York’s outer boroughs, where Trump’s nationalistic populism apparently resonates in a way that is anathema to the city’s cosmopolitan districts and immigrant enclaves…
Now, many News staffers and alumni feel like the air has been sucked out of the room, and they are perhaps coming to terms with the notion that Trump is more popular with segments of their readership than they thought, even in deep blue New York.
Problem solved.
The latest death throes of the News occasioned shrill attacks on Tronc, which bought it for nothing, from its media allies. It’s not Tronc’s fault that the failed tabloid is a failure. New York City can only support so many lefty papers. And if the Tronc bashers were honest, they would ask themselves if a media that panders to 12% of the population is really sustainable.
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