New York Post

The New York Post is one of the oldest (and according to some definitions, the oldest) newspapers still published in the United States. It was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801— as the New-York Evening Post, a broadsheet quite unlike today's tabloid. Early editorial work was done in the country weekend villa that is now Gracie Mansion. Hamilton chose for his first editor William Coleman, but the more famous 19th-century Evening Post editor was William Cullen Bryant, a strong Abolitionist. In 1881 Henry Villard took control of the Evening Post, which in 1897 passed to the management of his son, Oswald Garrison Villard, a founding member of both the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1933 the Post changed to tabloid format.Dorothy Schiff purchased the paper in 1939; her editor Ted Thackrey turned it into a streamlined tabloid format, then in 1977 was bought by Rupert Murdoch.

Trivia

• When Rupert Murdoch once asked the chairman of Bloomingdale's why he wasn't buying ads in the Post, he was told "because, dear Rupert, your readers are my shop-lifters."http://keywords.dsvr.co.uk/freepress/body.phtml?category=&id=583
• The Public Enemy song "A Letter to the New York Post" is a complaint about what they believed to be negative and inaccurate coverage the group received from the paper.
• In the spy farce film Top Secret!, one of the villain's henchmen is introduced as "Klaus . . . a moron, who knows only what he reads in the New York Post." The actor, a large man with a blank, rather unintelligent looking expression on his face, is holding a copy of the New York Post as this is said.