Media in New York City

New York City has been called the media capital of the world. The media of New York City are internationally influential and include some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, biggest record companies, and most prolific television studios in the world. It is a major global center for the book, magazine, music, newspaper, and television industries.

New York is also the largest media market in North America (followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto). Some of the city's media conglomerates include CNN ( CNN Global), the Hearst Corporation, NBCUniversal, The New York Times Company, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, the Thomson Reuters Corporation, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global. Seven of the world's top eight global advertising agency networks are headquartered in New York. Three of the " Big Four" record labels are also headquartered or co-headquartered in the city. One-third of all American independent films are produced in New York. More than 200 newspapers and 350 consumer magazines have an office in the city and the book-publishing industry employs about 25,000 people.

Two of the three U.S. national daily newspapers with the largest circulations in the United States are published in New York: ''The Wall Street Journal'' ; and ''The New York Times'', nicknamed “the Grey Lady” and which has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the U.S. media's "newspaper of record". Major tabloid newspapers in the city include ''The New York Daily News'', which was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, and ''The New York Post'', founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. ''Newsday'', a Long Island newspaper, is also widely circulated in the city. The city also has a major ethnic press, with 270 newspapers and magazines published in more than 40 languages. ''El Diario La Prensa'' is New York's largest Spanish-language daily and the oldest in the nation. ''The New York Amsterdam News'', published in Harlem, is a prominent African-American newspaper. '' The Village Voice'' was the largest alternative newspaper until it ceased publishing in 2018.

The television industry developed in New York and is a significant employer in the city's economy. The four major American broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, are all headquartered in New York. Many cable channels are based in the city as well, including CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, and Comedy Central. In 2005 there were more than 100 television shows taped in New York City.

New York is also a major center for non-commercial media. The oldest public-access cable television channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971. WNET is the city's major public television station and a primary provider of national Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programming. WNYC, a public radio station owned by the city until 1997, has the largest public radio audience in the United States. The City of New York operates a public broadcast service, NYC Media, that produces several original New York Emmy Award-winning shows covering music and culture in city neighborhoods, as well as city government-access television (GATV).

New York City is home to a number of major online media companies, including Yahoo and its operations under the AOL brand, along with news and entertainment companies like BuzzFeed and VICE Media.

Media industry profiles

Book publishing

The book publishing industry in the United States is based in New York. Publishing houses in the city range from industry giants such as Penguin Group (USA), HarperCollins, Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan to small niche houses like Melville House and Lee & Low Books. New York has also been the setting for countless works of literature, many of them produced by the city's large population of writers (which have included Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag and many others). The New York City metro area, home to the largest number of Jews and Italians outside Israel and Italy, respectively, has also been a flourishing scene for both Jewish American literature and Italian-American literature.

New York is also home to PEN America, the largest of the 141 centers of PEN International, the world's oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. PEN America plays an important role in New York's literary community and is active in defending free speech, the promotion of literature, and the fostering of international literary fellowship. Author Jennifer Egan is its current president.

Some of the most important literary journals in the United States are in New York. These include ''The Paris Review'', ''The New York Review of Books'', ''n+1'', and '' New York Quarterly''. Other New York literary publications include ''Circumference'', ''Open City'', ''The Manhattan Review'', '' The Coffin Factory'', ''Fence'', and ''Telos''. New York is also home to the US offices of ''Granta''.

Film

New York is a prominent location for the American entertainment industry, with many films, television series, books, and other media being set there. , New York City was the second largest center for filmmaking and television production in the United States, producing about 200 feature films annually, employing 130,000 individuals; the filmed entertainment industry has been growing in New York, contributing nearly US$9 billion to the New York City economy alone as of 2015, and by volume, New York is the world leader in independent film production – one-third of all American independent films are produced in New York City. The Association of Independent Commercial Producers is also based in New York. In the first five months of 2014 alone, location filming for television pilots in New York City exceeded the record production levels for all of 2013, with New York surpassing Los Angeles as the top North American city for the same distinction during the 2013/2014 cycle. International film makers are featured prominently in New York City as well.

In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York was the epicenter of filmmaking. However, the drier weather of Hollywood and tax incentives offered at the time by filming in Los Angeles made California a better choice for film production throughout much of the 20th century. The Kaufman Astoria Studios film studio, built during the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, and has expanded its footprint in Queens. It has also been used for ''The Cosby Show'', ''Sesame Street'' and the films of Woody Allen. The recently constructed Steiner Studios is a 15-acre (61,000 m²) modern movie studio complex in a former shipyard where ''The Producers'' and ''The Inside Man'', a Spike Lee movie, were filmed.

New York was, and to a certain extent still is, also important within the animation industry. Until 1938, it served as the home of Fleischer Studios (who produced the Popeye, and Color Classics shorts for Paramount Pictures) as well as the Van Beuren Studios (who produced animated shorts for RKO Radio Pictures) until 1937. It would later be the home for Famous Studios (who replaced Fleischer Studios and continued the production of Popeye shorts for Paramount) from 1943 to the 1960s. Its current position in the animation world is as an alternative to Los Angeles (where most U.S. animation is produced), and the city now houses several schools and school programs concerning animation, and stands as a source of work for animators working for any medium, from advertising to film.

Silvercup Studios has expanded in Long Island City, Queens with numerous soundstages, production and studio support space, offices for media and entertainment companies, stores, 1,000 apartments in high-rise towers, a catering hall and a cultural institution, built at the edge of the East River in Queens, overlooking Manhattan, and maintaining its status as the largest production house on the U.S. East Coast. Steiner Studios in Brooklyn still has the largest individual soundstage, however. Miramax Films, a Big Ten film studio, was the largest motion picture distribution and production company headquartered in the city until it moved to Burbank, California in January 2010. Many smaller independent producers and distributors are located in New York.

Film-related lists

* List of film festivals in New York City
* List of New York City television and film studios

Magazines

New York City has a long history in American magazine publishing based in New York City.
* ''Billboard''
* ''Bloomberg Businessweek''
* ''Brooklyn Magazine''
* ''The Brooklyn Rail''
* ''City Limits''
* ''Cosmopolitan''
* ''Entertainment Weekly''
* '' GO NYC''
* ''Harper's Bazaar''
* '' The L Magazine''
* '' L'Idea''
* ''Manhattan, inc.'' (defunct)
* ''New York''
* ''The New Yorker''
* '' Next Magazine''
* ''Rolling Stone''
* '' Seventeen''
* '' The Real Deal''
* ''Time Out NY''
* ''Time''
* '' Vogue''

Music

In the 1930s, New York-based RCA was the nation's largest manufacturer of phonographs. In the late 19th and early 20th century, most sheet music in the United States—especially the popular songs of the day, many now standards—was printed at Tin Pan Alley, so called because the constant sound of new songs being tried out on pianos in the publishing houses was said to sound like a tin pan. By the early 1960s the radio and musical stars of the Golden Age of Broadway gave way to the Brill Building's "Brill Sound".

Salsa music, which got its start in New York City in the mid-1960s, was popularized by the New York record label Fania Records, which developed a highly polished "Fania sound" that came to be synonymous with salsa.

In the 1980s and 1990s, hip hop labels including Def Jam, Roc-A-Fella and Bad Boy Records were founded in New York, creating what is known as East Coast hip hop. These labels continue to be among the largest hip-hop labels in the world. Other influential New York-based hip hop labels, past and present, include Cold Chillin' Records, Jive Records, Loud Records, Rawkus Records and Tommy Boy Records.

Two of the "Big Four" music labels are headquartered in the city: Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. The world headquarters of MTV is also in New York.

Many major music magazines are headquartered in the city as well, including ''Blender Magazine'', '' Punk Magazine'', ''Spin'' and ''Rolling Stone''.

Newspapers

New York City is home to 4 of the 10 largest papers in the United States. These include ''The New York Times'' (circulation 571,500), the ''New York Post'' (circulation 414,254), and the '' Daily News'' (circulation 227,352). ''The Wall Street Journal'' (circulation 2.2 million), published in New York City, is a national-scope business newspaper and the first or second most-read newspaper in the nation, depending on measurement method.

''El Diario La Prensa'' (circulation 265,000) is New York's largest Spanish-language daily and the oldest in the nation. There are also several borough-specific newspapers, such as ''The Brooklyn Daily Eagle'' and '' The Staten Island Advance''. Free daily newspapers mainly distributed to commuters include ''amNewYork'', ''Hoy'' and ''Metro New York''. In addition to the print newspapers, '' BKLYNER'' is the leading daily digital news publication reporting on local news and events in Brooklyn.

The city's ethnic press is large and diverse. Major ethnic publications include the Roman Catholic diocesan paper for Brooklyn-Queens, ''The Tablet'' and Jewish-American newspapers ''The Jewish Daily Forward'' (פֿאָרװערטס; ''Forverts'', published in Yiddish and English) (founded in 1897), and African-American newspapers, including the long-time newspaper ''The New York Amsterdam News'' (founded in 1909) and Brooklyn-based Our Time Press. ''The Epoch Times'', an international newspaper published by the Falun Gong, has English and Chinese editions in New York. There are seven dailies published in Chinese and four in Spanish. Multiple daily papers are published in Italian, Greek, Polish, and Korean, and other weekly newspapers serve dozens of different ethnic communities, with ten separate newspapers focusing on the African-American community alone. Many nationally distributed ethnic newspapers are based in Astoria, Chinatown or Brooklyn. Over 60 ethnic groups, writing in 42 languages, publishing over 200 non-English language magazines and newspapers in New York City, including newspapers in 95 non-English languages and local radio broadcasts in over 30 languages.

Ethnic variation is not the only measure of the diversity of New York City's newspapers, with editorial opinions running from left-leaning at alternative papers like the ''Village Voice'' (before its closure in 2018), to conservative at the ''New York Post''. ''New York Observer'' covers politics and the city's rich and powerful with unusual depth. The tradition of a free press owes much to John Peter Zenger, a New York publisher who was acquitted in his 1735 landmark court case, setting the precedent that truth was a legitimate defense against accusations of libel.

Major newspapers emphasizing coverage of the New York metropolitan region outside the city include ''Newsday'', which covers primarily Long Island but also New York City, (especially Brooklyn and Queens), ''The Journal News'', which covers Westchester County, to the north along the Hudson River and ''The Bergen Record'' and ''The Star-Ledger'', of Newark which cover northern New Jersey across the New York Bay and Hudson River to the west.

Online media

New York City's digital companies, sometimes described as "Silicon Alley", include both software companies and companies known primarily as content producers. Among the former are Tumblr (now owned by Automattic), Foursquare, and AOL. Among the latter are G/O Media, BuzzFeed (which now owns HuffPost since 2020) and Weblogs, Inc., which is currently part of Yahoo. The satirical newspaper ''The Onion'' (online-only since 2013) was based in New York from 2000 to 2012.

Broadcast radio

AM stations

* 570 WMCA New York City ( Christian)
* 620 WSNR Jersey City, NJ (Russian/variety)
* 660 WFAN New York City (Sports)¹
* 710 WOR New York City (Conservative talk)¹
* 770 WABC New York City (Conservative talk)¹
* 820 WNYC New York City (NPR/talk)^†
* 880 WCBS New York City (All-news)¹
* 930 WPAT Paterson, NJ ( Brokered/ethnic)
* 970 WNYM Hackensack, NJ (Conservative talk)
* 1010 WINS New York City (All-news)
* 1050 WEPN New York City (Sports)
* 1100 WHLI Hempstead (Oldies)²
* 1130 WBBR New York City (Bloomberg Radio)¹
* 1160 WVNJ

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