Daily News Tonight's 1980 Fail: Murdoch, Trump, and a Dream

Vanity Fair has the inside story of one of media's most epic flops: *Daily News Tonight*. It was a $20 million bet to drag the bestselling U.S. newspaper of all time upmarket, and it crashed so hard it nearly let a young Donald Trump become a publisher.

Here's the setup. The *Daily News* had been king since 1919. By the late '70s, blue-collar readers were fleeing, and Rupert Murdoch had turned the *New York Post* into a sleaze machine. The answer? Go posh. Editor Mike O'Neill, who was apparently embarrassed to tell cocktail party guests he ran a tabloid, decided the future was upscale readers.

The weapon: a new afternoon edition called *Daily News Tonight*, built around a 24-page section called Manhattan. It featured arts coverage, profiles of the rich, and a gossip column from Claudia Cohen, lured away from Murdoch's *Post*. To lead it, O'Neill picked Clay Felker, the editor who invented the modern magazine — and who had been forced out of *New York* by Murdoch. Revenge was on the menu.

But Felker was a disaster in the newsroom. He brought in high-paid outsiders, took leisurely restaurant lunches while the regular reporters ate at their desks, and condescended to the staff. One ad showed commuters reading *The New York Times* in the morning and *Tonight* on the ride home. "Obviously, it's aimed at more affluent, upscale people," Felker said. "I mean, it's not the Queens housewife." The old guard called him "Clayatollah."

Murdoch smelled blood. He switched the *Post* to an all-day newspaper, lowered its price to match, and crushed *Tonight* with the very mayhem and cheesecake the *Daily News* was fleeing. Circulation hit maybe 100,000 a day — not the 300,000 they projected. Felker was fired in June 1981; the paper died two months later.

The bill came due. The *Daily News* went up for sale in 1982. Enter Donald Trump, then a 35-year-old "whiz-kid developer," who claimed he'd buy it without spending a dime. The deal fell apart. The paper limped on, winning Pulitzers, but *Tonight* had set it on a path from dominance to irrelevance.

As Vanity Fair notes, the whole thing was "groupthink, arrogance, and desperation." And it paved the way for Murdoch to become America's media mogul. Not bad for a newspaper that had Lincoln's quote "God must have loved the common people" carved in stone on its building — and then decided the common people weren't good enough.

• Clay Felker
• Daily News Tonight
• Donald Trump
• Mike O'Neill
• New York Daily News
• Rupert Murdoch