The New York Herald Tribune

Place: New York

Born: 1835

Death: 1924

Biography:

The New York Herald was a large-distribution newspaper based in New York City that existed between 1835 and 1924. It was founded by James Gordon Bennett Sr. and was considered to be the most intrusive and sensationalist of the leading New York papers. Its ability to entertain the public with timely daily news made it the leading circulation paper of its period. The New York Herald Tribune was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald. It was regarded as a 'writer's newspaper' and competed with The New York Times in the daily morning market. The paper won twelve Pulitzer Prizes during its lifetime. It was a 'Republican paper, a Protestant paper and a paper more representative of the suburbs than the ethnic mix of the city', according to one later reporter. The paper generally did not match the comprehensiveness of The New York Times' coverage, but its national, international and business coverage, as well as its overall style, was generally viewed as among the best in the industry. The New York Herald Tribune struggled financially for most of its life and rarely generated enough profit for growth or capital improvements. It enjoyed prosperity during World War II and by the end of the conflict had pulled close to the Times in ad revenue. However, a series of disastrous business decisions, combined with aggressive competition from the Times and poor leadership from the Reid family, left the Herald Tribune far behind its rival. In 1958, the Reids sold the Herald Tribune to John Hay Whitney, a multimillionaire Wall Street investor who was serving as ambassador to the United Kingdom at the time. Under his leadership, the Tribune experimented with new layouts and new approaches to reporting the news and made important contributions to the body of New Journalism that developed in the 1960s. The paper steadily revived under Whitney, but a 114-day newspaper strike stopped the Herald Tribune's gains and ushered in four years of strife with labor unions, particularly the local chapter of the International Typographical Union. Faced with mounting losses, Whitney attempted to merge the Herald Tribune with the New York World-Telegram and the New York Journal-American in the spring of 1966; the proposed merger led to another lengthy strike, and on August 15, 1966, Whitney announced the closure of the Herald Tribune. Combined with investments in the World Journal Tribune, Whitney spent $39.5 million (equivalent to $370,710,006 in 2023 dollars) in his attempts to keep the newspaper alive.