Press: Disaster in the Afternoon

The Daily News retrenches after a major expansion flops

The plans were as ambitious—and possibly as ill-conceived—as any newspaper publisher has hatched in recent memory. Last August, faced with a precipitous circulation decline, New York's Daily News (circ. 1.5 million) launched an evening edition, called Tonight, as part of a $20 million revitalization campaign. Once America's biggest daily, the News lost that title to the Wall Street Journal (circ. 1.9 million) in 1979. Tonight was supposed to halt the News's circulation losses (450,000 since 1975) by adding "up-scale" readers and advertisers to...