The New York Daily News ousted its top editor in an unexpected shakeup on Monday, with insiders blaming ruthless cost-cutting by the paper’s new hedge-fund owner.
The 102-year-old paper said its editor-in-chief, Robert York, is being replaced on an interim and “as-needed” basis by Andrew Julien, the editor and publisher of its sibling publication, the Hartford Courant.
Julien will remain top editor of the Courant while a search for a permanent editor takes place, the company said. Daily News owner Tribune Publishing didn’t return requests for further comment on the surprise shuffle.
According to a source, York’s departure is the latest signal that the Daily News’ new owner, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, isn’t looking for a powerful editor or publisher to run the paper. Instead, Alden appears set on making do with “a few dozen minions” that reports into a “corporate manager,” the source said.
“York already was more of a publisher than an editor in chief,” the source said. “He wasn’t setting the course of the coverage. He wasn’t a huge factor in our lives.”
The insider predicted York’s replacement will likewise be occupied more with the business side than the editorial, which is effectively run by managing editor Robert Dominguez.
Even so, some of York’s decisions did ruffle the feathers of the 70-plus-person newsroom.
Journalists complained about a focus under York on getting more “clicks” on trending stories to get advertisers in 2018-2019 versus installing a paywall. Only during the pandemic did the newspaper put up a metered paywall in order to pump up revenue.
Another unpopular decision by York was that he put video advertising at the top of online stories, making the reading experience “jarring,” staffers griped . The exec also promised to retool the website in order to maximize web traffic, but that “never happened,” one employee noted.
“York was really affable and supportive of the journalism we did. The issue wasn’t his personality. It was more about how newspapers should become money makers in the future,” the employee said.
York, who was editor and publisher of Tribune title the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 2018, grabbed the reins as editor-in-chief of the Daily News in 2020.
In May, Tribune, which also owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel, was bought by Alden Global Capital in a deal worth $633 million.
The deal made Alden, which also owns newspapers through its MediaNews Group subsidiary, the second-largest newspaper chain in the United States behind USA Today owner Gannett.
Since the acquisition, the Daily News and the Courant enacted buyouts, allowing the publications to reduce the headcount of the already lean mastheads. At the time, the NewsGuild, the union that represents journalists at both publications, said just eight Daily News staffers and five Courant employees took the buyouts.
Alden’s acquisition of Tribune was fiercely opposed by journalists at the media company, as the hedge fund is known for ruthless cost-cutting and layoffs. Journalists wanted Tribune management to seek local owners that wouldn’t necessarily take a scalpel to the business.
Maryland businessman Stewart Bainum Jr. emerged as a potential buyer for the entire chain of papers, but financing didn’t come through and Tribune shareholders approved Alden’s proposal in May.
The announcement, which is effective immediately, was made via memos sent to Daily News and Courant staffers.
“This is to inform you that effective immediately, Andrew Julien will be serving as interim editor-in-chief on an as-needed basis of the New York Daily News, replacing Robert York,” the memo said.
The note added that Julien has a career spanning “more than 25 years” and that he “grew up in New York.”
The latest upheaval at the Daily News comes days after the paper announced it hired former New York Post gossip columnist and Page Six editor Richard Johnson, who recently came out of retirement.