The Importance of Daily News

Whether exciting and uplifting, tragic and scary, or sensationalistic and trivial, daily news keeps people informed on the things that matter to them. Although many of us now get our news from television, radio, and the Internet, newspapers continue to be one of the most time-honored ways to receive news.

For almost a century, the New York Daily News was a major newspaper that served its readers with world and local news. Often locked in a circulation battle with its even more sensational rival tabloid, the New York Post, the Daily News maintained its status as one of the country’s top news outlets throughout the 20th century.

Its headquarters at 450 West 33rd Street in downtown Manhattan straddled the railroad tracks leading into Pennsylvania Station and was also a popular gathering place for people from all walks of life. The News had a reputation for breaking big stories, such as the murder of child evangelist Ruth Snyder in 1928, when a reporter strapped a camera to his leg and shot a famous photograph that carried the headline, “DEAD!”

While we may still be unable to hold an entire city’s attention with a single screamer like “Ford to City: Drop Dead!”, the daily news continues to play an important role in today’s society. The newspaper’s current editorial policy emphasizes community engagement, and its newsroom continues to be known for its high-quality reporting and steadfast commitment to ethics.

With the onset of political populism and polarization, as well as the destabilization of established democratic patterns and behaviours, the normative expectation that citizens should pay some attention to a public world and issues of common concern seems ever more pertinent. However, the ways in which people do so are varied and complex (Couldry et al. 2010; Kaun 2012; Naerland 2019).

Survey analyses often seek to quantify people’s relations with news by asking for frequency or how much time they spend on different media platforms (e.g., Thurman and Fletcher 2019). Both of these measures, however, are problematic in this context. They fail to capture the complex nature of everyday news use, and collapsing all forms of media consumption into a single dimension reduces its complexity and relevance for grasping citizens’ societal orientations through news (Moe, Ytre-Arne, and Naerland 2019).

Consequently, the study of news use must move beyond snapshots of people’s relation with the news and problematic platform-specific measurements such as time spent, to explore what it means for people to connect with a public world and what this implies for democracy. We need a user-centred approach to this question, and it is one we will pursue in our ongoing project.