New York Post

The New York Post, is a daily print and digital tabloid founded by Alexander Hamilton. It is controlled today by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Publisher: Sean Giancola; Executive editor: Keith Poole.

When the New-York Evening Post first appeared in November 1801, it was less a business venture than a political weapon. Alexander Hamilton, the former treasury secretary and chief theorist of the Federalist Party, pulled together $10,000 from a circle of New York merchants and lawyers to found a newspaper that would resist the Jeffersonian tide then sweeping the young republic. He installed William Coleman as editor, and the paper spoke in the clipped, combative cadences of Federalist argument: strong central government, skepticism of popular democracy, and belief that the country’s commercial future lay with entrepreneurs and international trade.

The Evening Post’s character shifted with the city around it. The most important editor of that era, the poet and abolitionist William Cullen Bryant, turned what had been a vehicle for polemic into a respected liberal paper. The Post backed the anti-slavery cause, supported Abraham Lincoln, and after the war argued for reconstruction and civil rights. The paper’s seriousness was such that John Stuart Mill, writing from Britain, praised it as one of the few American papers worth reading.

That highminded broadsheet would have been unrecognizable to a reader picking up the Post in the modern age. Over the twentieth century, as New York’s newspaper market grew more cutthroat, the paper changed physically and temperamentally. The Post ultimately adopted the square tabloid format—roughly 11 by 11 inches—which made it easier to read on the subway and allowed for the pugnacious headlines that would become its signature.

The smaller page size wasn’t just a production decision; it was an aesthetic and editorial choice. Tabloids reward compression and spectacle: a single photograph dominating the front, a few words in type large enough to be read across a newsstand. The Post learned to live on those inches, trading the long editorial essay for sharp, sometimes brutal wit. By mid-century it had developed a reputation for crusading liberal politics on one hand and an increasingly lively, sometimes lurid news mix on the other, a bridge between respectable opinion journalism and the rougher world of the true crime magazines.

A pivotal moment for New York and the news came in 1976, when Rupert Murdoch bought the struggling paper for $30.5 million. Murdoch had entered the American market in 1973 with the purchase of the San Antonio Express-News, but the Post gave him an important foothold in the world’s largest news market.

At the Post Murdoch pushed the formula to fit New York: crime splashed across the front page, sex and celebrity inside, and politics framed through a sharp, right-leaning, often confrontational lens. Reporters like Steve Dunleavy became famous for wringing drama out of street mayhem and private scandal. The paper’s coverage mafia stories in the 1970s and ’80s is now regarded as the essence of big-city tabloid journalism. The front pages—the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines that critics derided as vulgar and fans saw as works of art—gave the paper a unique place of its own the city’s life. The paper’s gossip column, Page Six, became a kind of unofficial social register, a place where celebrities dreaded and courted mention in equal measure.

Murdoch was forced to sell the Post in 1988 because of federal cross-ownership rules, but he reacquired it in 1993, folding it into his News Corp empire, where it has stayed ever since. Under his family’s control the paper has generally taken a conservative line, especially on national politics, crime, and culture-war issues. It promoted Donald Trump as a New York celebrity long before he was a politician and later became a reliable media ally, endorsing him in 2016 and 2020 while battering his opponents with aggressive tabloid attacks.

In recent years the paper has won recognition from local press clubs for deeply reported work even as it keeps pushing the outer edge of taste with its splashy covers.

Today the New York Post is a national and increasingly digital brand whose audience stretches far beyond the five boroughs, with new ventures like the planned California Post meant to export its brash sensibility across the country.

The New York Post is owned by NYP Holdings, Inc., a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

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