He also puts his reporters to work on the murder of a young woman and the involvement of racketeer Tomas Rienzi, which could turn out to be a circulation builder that keeps the paper in business or else the last big story it ever covers.

Reporters discover that the dead girl, Bessie Schmidt, had been Rienzi's mistress, and that her brother Herman had illegal business dealings with the gangster.

All seems lost when Mrs. Garrison's daughters, majority stockholders Kitty and Alice, refuse to budge, causing a judge to permit The Day to be sold.

Bessie's elderly mother, Mrs. Schmidt, turns up in Hutcheson's office with her daughter's diary and $200,000 in cash, implicating Rienzi in his illegal activities.

Tough as Nails, a biography of Brooks authored by Douglass K. Daniel, cites the 1931 death of the New York World newspaper as the basis for the film, including the decision by the sons of Joseph Pulitzer to sell the paper rather than run it themselves.