Newspapers in New York, Like Their Readers, Are Vanishing

NEW YORK — Kenny Hospot is in some ways a typical reader of The Daily News. He’s a construction worker from Queens who’s lived in the city most of his life. He always liked reading the comics and the horoscope in The News.

How long since he last bought a copy of the paper? Hospot laughed. “I would say like 15 years.”

Kamel Brown is another archetypal customer for New York’s Hometown Newspaper, as The Daily News styles itself. He’s a maintenance worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He’s 55 years old. He grew up buying the paper for his grandmother in Brooklyn. “When she was finished reading it, I’d pick it up, flip back and start with the sports,” Brown said.

He doesn’t remember the last time he bought it. When he paged through a copy at a friend’s home this past week, he was unimpressed.

Tristan Dominguez, on the other hand, is still a big Daily News fan. “It’s the only place you see anything local,” Dominguez said at a bodega in Washington Heights, where a stack of papers sat behind the counter.

He reads the paper mostly online and through Twitter.

All of this helps explain why there was an air of inevitability about the news Monday that the organization was laying off half its editorial staff.

Once upon a time, The Daily News sold more than 2 million papers a day. Now its circulation is only about a tenth of that, and the paper’s non-hometown owner, the Chicago-based media company Tronc, which bought the paper in 2017, does not have the patience for non-profitability that the prior owner, Mort Zuckerman, did.

At a cultural moment when the very idea of New York City as a hometown is quickly dissolving, and when most people get their news from some sort of glowing screen, the thirst for local ink is not what it used to be.

And those who do crave hard-hitting coverage that holds officials accountable for the state of the city were not pleased to hear about the layoffs.

“You need those old-school people because they know what they’re doing,” Rosanne Nunziata, a manager at the New Apollo Diner in downtown Brooklyn, said of The Daily News’ staff of veteran shoe-leather reporters, many of whom are now pounding the pavement in search of employment. “They know how to sneak in and get their stories, and know how to get witnesses to talk and do their thing.” Dominguez, 39, said a smaller News staff might affect the city’s “awareness of what’s going to happen with the political figures in the city and what the police are doing.”

“The issues of people who are fighting landlords and police corruption and all these kinds of things tend to be carried more by The Post and The Daily News,” he added.

The New York Post, The Daily News’ longtime rival for tabloid dominance, has seen its circulation plummet, too. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns The Post, has long tolerated the paper’s unprofitability, but there may come a time when his successors have far less stomach for red ink.

The digital landscape for local news media in New York is also unsettled. DNAinfo and Gothamist, two popular news sites, were shut down in 2017 by their owner, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade. Gothamist has since re-emerged under new ownership, but in a less expansive form.

There are, of course, still people who treasure the solidity of newsprint. Some of them are even young. Ella Noman, 25, who works in a flower shop near the 30th Avenue subway station in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, said she read the store’s copy of The Daily News every day, in part because she felt that the news she sees on social media can be unreliable.

“Not everything comes in the internet,” Noman said. “It goes really fast, and I can’t find much detail.” But they are fewer and fewer. Domingo Taveras, 55, who works at the Vinmel and Jose Barber Shop on West 110th Street in Manhattan, said he missed the days when customers would read the paper while waiting for a haircut.

“Inside this barber shop, nobody reads The Daily News, or any paper at all, to be honest,” he said.

That includes Taveras himself. He gets most of his news from NY1 or the occasional copy of The Post he finds lying around. When he reads The Daily News, he does so on his phone. (The News installed a paywall on its website in February. Readership promptly tanked, The Post gleefully reported.)

Brown, the MTA maintenance worker, said he had noticed The News shift focus to its online content, which is unapologetically heavy on sensational out-of-town news. “I could see the quality of the coverage was diminishing over time,” Brown said as he stood near the Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan. “The recent times that I’ve had the paper in my hands, the print, the quality of the paper, it just didn’t look like The Daily News that I grew up with.”

Monday’s paper was typical Daily News fare, if thinner than it used to be. The cover was an against-the-grain good-news story about a drug addict who got clean at Rikers Island: “JAIL SAVED MY LIFE.” The sports back cover had New York Mets pitching ace Noah Syndergaard, who is sidelined with a highly contagious virus, photoshopped into a hazmat suit (“HAZ-MET!”).

In between were follow-ups about the lead-paint scandal in city public housing — a story The News first broke — an update on the Cannibal Cop case and a Hometown Hero profile of a police detective who is “busting barriers and building bridges in the Bronx.”

But Brown said he would not be buying the paper anytime soon.

He might still read it if he comes across a copy. Then again, he might not.

“With these recent cuts,” he asked, “is it really a newspaper anymore?”