New York Daily Mirror

The New York Daily Mirror was an American morning tabloid newspaper first published on June 24, 1924, in New York City by the William Randolph Hearst organization as a contrast to their mainstream broadsheets, the Evening Journal and New York American, later consolidated into the New York Journal American. It was created to compete with the New York Daily News which was then a sensationalist tabloid and the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States. Hearst preferred the broadsheet format and sold the Mirror to an associate in 1928, only to buy it back in 1932. Hearst hired Philip Payne away from the Daily News as managing editor of the Mirror. Payne's circulation building stunts ranged from reviving the sensational Hall-Mills murder case to sponsoring and being a passenger on the Old Glory, transatlantic flying record attempt, in which he was killed. Early on, several bright young writers and photographic journalists joined the Daily Mirror, such as Ring Lardner, Jr., Hy Peskin and the political commentator Drew Pearson. The poet-songwriter Nick Kenny was the paper's radio editor, and Edward Zeltner contributed a column. The gossip columnist Walter Winchell and managing editor Emile Gauvreau were both hired away from the New York Evening Graphic, the city's third sensational tabloid. Winchell was given his own radio show and syndicated, in his prime—the 1940s and early 1950s—in more than 2000 daily papers. During the three tabloids' 1920s circulation war, management of the Mirror estimated that its content was 10% news and 90% entertainment. For example, the Mirror and Graphic both had devoted substantial resources to the exploitation of scandal with repeated stories on such events as the divorce trial of real estate tycoon Edward West "Daddy" Browning who at age 51 had married 16-year-old Frances Belle "Peaches" Heenan, as well as constant coverage of the decade's celebrities like Rudolph Valentino, Babe Ruth and Charles A. Lindbergh. By the 1930s, the Daily Mirror was one of the Hearst Corporation's largest papers in terms of circulation.