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Once there was another newspaper here.

It was born with great hopes but died before it became a teenager. It sought to mix the solid journalism of the New York Times with the aggressively colorful coverage of the Daily News and the New York Post. Its staff was younger than that of most newsrooms, and strikingly more diverse. This newspaper was kinder than the tabloids, could wear its heart on its sleeve, and for this it was occasionally mocked. But over drinks, in a reflexive moment, the others—the mockers—might just admit that they envied it a little bit, too.

New York Newsday was launched in 1985 and closed on July 16, 1995, thirty years ago this month. Its owner, the also long-gone Times Mirror Co., wasn’t satisfied with its company-wide profit, which in 1994 had been more than $174 million.

Its slogan was “Truth, Justice and the Comics,” and its pages freeze-framed a remarkable decade of change and strife in New York City: The city’s first Black mayor. Record-breaking crime. The ascent of Rudy Giuliani. A catastrophic nightclub fire in the Bronx. Race riots and police riots. The bombing of the World Trade Center. Foiled terrorist plots. Fierce cultural battles over schoolbooks featuring same-sex parents.

Today it seems incredible to imagine it—a robustly staffed new newspaper, the city’s first in color, entering the country’s most crowded media market and building a classic print infrastructure from the ground up: nearly a hundred reporters (unionized); a generously staffed city desk; bureaus in City Hall, two boroughs, police headquarters, and the courts; an investigative unit; a features section; a fat Sunday edition; editorial and op-ed pages; and movie critics, fashion reporters, a cartoonist, a restaurant reviewer, and a murderers’ row of columnists including Murray Kempton, Gail Collins, Jimmy Breslin, Jim Dwyer, Sheryl McCarthy, Liz Smith, and Ellis Henican.

It shared a powerful Washington bureau with Long Island’s Newsday, from which it sprang, as well as a handful of foreign correspondents. And it worked hard to build a staff that reflected a multicolored, multicultural city.

“No one had seen—in journalism history, honestly—so many reporters hired that were so diverse: racially and ethnically diverse, age- and class-diverse, of the communities they covered,” said Rose Arce, who joined the paper from the Daily News in her late twenties. “I truly believe it made an enormous difference in the quality and breadth of the reporting.” 

Today, with the Daily News put out by a skeleton staff and printed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the Times sailing on without dedicated daily Metro pages in print nor even a New York City link on the homepage (just a drop-down), New York Newsday and the bet on local city journalism it represented seem like a distant, crazy dream.

And it was. When New York Newsday died, it became one of several short-lived but storied New York outlets that punched above their weight but died before their time, like DNA.info and the Wall Street Journal’s “Greater New York” section would later, as well as PM, the legendarily creative liberal afternoon newspaper from the 1940s.

For those who worked at New York Newsday, it fills an outsize portion of memory banks. I know it does for me. I was twenty-four when I was hired in the Brooklyn bureau.

“I’ve often wished—and I know I’m not the only one—that at the time I had just relaxed into it and fully enjoyed it,” said Michael Powell, the paper’s last City Hall bureau chief, who joined in late 1987 and now writes for The Atlantic.

“But you are young,” he said. “You have ambition. You are applying to the Washington Post, talking to the New York Times. If I had it to do over again, I’d say, ‘Forget that.’ Because what was happening there was pretty fucking amazing.”

But easy on the nostalgia: the place wasn’t perfect. The paper’s tabloid instincts were never quite as sharp as its competitors—one dubbed it a “Tabloid in a Tutu,” and the name stuck. Being printed on Long Island required early deadlines that missed some big stories in that pre-internet era. And it turned out that mixing the old and the new isn’t always easy—especially inside a place as volatile (or dysfunctional) as a newsroom.

Many of its alumni still plug away, writing or editing for the Times or running outlets like the Hechinger Report, to give just two examples. “So many careers were launched that would never have been launched, honestly—particularly among the Latino and Black reporters,” said Arce, today a documentary filmmaker. 

New York Newsday covered all kinds of stories from far-flung neighborhoods, not just the ones where someone got shot. It put new immigrants front and center (they were potential readers, after all). And it liked to have fun—Susan Forrest’s coverage of the emotional trials of Gus the Polar Bear in the Central Park Zoo (he was on Prozac) became a worldwide sensation; a column by Collins about police officers contending with a swarm of bees in Midtown remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read on newsprint.

Even the Times conceded: “It was the first daily paper to cover more in the boroughs on a day-to-day basis than crime and the courts. It saw itself as the newspaper of a new, more diverse middle class.” Flipping through a yellowing copy thirty years later, I’m struck by the quality of the writing and reporting.

When eighty-seven revelers died in the Happy Land social club arson fire in the Bronx in 1990, scores of New York Newsday reporters covered it from every possible angle—an editor was even dispatched to the scene to direct the troops. That coverage was a Pulitzer finalist.

The paper would soon have two Pulitzers: for a sixteen-page wraparound section covering a subway derailment in Union Square in 1991, and for Dwyer, the homegrown columnist who in many ways was its soul. Dwyer’s initial column, published three times a week, was devoted entirely to the universe of the New York City subways.

That idea came from Don Forst, the paper’s editor, and it was one of his better ones. Forst was quiet, short and stocky (he lifted weights), with a shaggy 1960s haircut and a propensity for wide ties, suspenders, and overalls (not at the same time). Some loved him, some did not. I’m still trying to decide.

He’d worked for the New York Herald Tribune and a raft of other papers, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where he famously invented “Hippo Watch” to provide readers with daily updates on a hippopotamus named Bubbles who had escaped from a local zoo. (Bubbles later died.) When the Times Mirror Co., led by David Laventhol, a Forst chum from “the Trib,” made the bold decision in the mid-1980s to invade New York from the east, where the company’s Newsday was so profitable it might as well have been printing hundred-dollar bills on its presses, Laventhol tapped Forst to run the thing.

We will never know if that was genius or a mistake, because no one else was ever given the helm. Was a golden opportunity missed to hire the city’s first female editor in chief, or the first editor in chief of color? No doubt Forst had strong tabloid credentials, but his ideas didn’t always mesh with the tastes of the journalists he hired. Nor was he always good at navigating these disagreements. And several former female staffers said Forst was among the chief culprits when it came to infuriatingly routine sexist banter in the newsroom, even as he regularly promoted women editors.

When it came to the front page, Forst would say he wanted to engage the reader, rather than beat the reader over the head, and the paper certainly played with story ideas and presentations that were indisputably modern, almost like imbuing print with the internet sensibilities of today.

During the 1992 Democratic convention in Manhattan, for example, page one featured a checkerboard of beaming mug shots of Bill Clinton with the headline “Bill’s All Smiles.” After Clinton won, one front-page headline read, “What It Means to You”—an early precursor to the second-person headlines so often featured these days, in the Times and elsewhere. (“What You Need to Know About [fill in the blank].”)

Martin Dunn, the editor of the Daily News at the time, and a friend, mixed praise with constructive criticism, once telling me he thought New York Newsday’s front pages were creative but tried too hard to be different, rather than simply putting the most important news of the day first for the reader.

And Forst could whiff. When Timothy M. Phelps, of the Washington bureau, broke details of Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas—a world-beating exclusive the relevance of which is still felt today—Forst led with Liz Taylor’s wedding.

Asked for thoughts on his former boss, Michael Powell took a moment to find the right words. “Forst was certainly… complicated,” he said.

Some called the paper Laventhol’s Folly. Accurate or not, it scared the competition, which began to hire more aggressively, turn up their already high volumes, and poach New York Newsday’s best. The Times launched the City section—the remnants of which live on today in Sunday’s Metropolitan section. The big winner in all of this was New York City.

There were 2,225 murders in 1991, the year I was hired, and the paper was firing on all cylinders. It had just launched weekly sections for Brooklyn and Queens with their own dedicated columnists, and it had moved its main office into an entire floor at 2 Park Avenue in Manhattan. There was a feeling, even as we went about the grind of putting out a daily paper, that we were part of something that would never happen again.

New York Newsday was initially conceived as a “creeping acquisition” that would capture one reader at a time as it moved methodically west from Nassau County over the course of a decade. But a catastrophic strike at the Daily News in 1990 and 1991 altered the equation. For a moment it looked like the Daily News might not survive, and suddenly Laventhol’s Folly seemed like a brilliant idea; if the Daily News went away, then the New York market would have a juicy opening for New York Newsday. Even if the circulation was modest, it would still be a big buy for advertisers when combined with the Long Island readership.

It was during the strike when Forst called Collins, a columnist at the Daily News who was on the picket line, and offered her a job. “I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was make fun of the city government,” she recalled. And so she did, twice a week.

“So many columnists,” she said, marveling, recalling the energetic row of cubicles where the name writers sat. “We all got along well; I don’t remember any sense of incredible hysterical competition between us.”

But the Daily News did not go away; in fact, when the real estate developer Mort Zuckerman bought it, it entered its own new golden age, hiring aggressively, marketing itself aggressively, breaking more stories, and stealing some of the thunder from the interloper, which it belittled with ads mocking its suburban Long Island origins. (The ads featured cows.)

Now it was a knife fight.

The Daily News moved out of its famed but decrepit Superman-set offices on Forty-Second and into new offices on West Thirty-Third Street. It built a new plant across the Hudson River in Jersey City, a brick-and-mortar indication that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Down on South Street, after its own near-death experience, the New York Post came back to life in 1993 with a new owner, a guy named Rupert Murdoch. Here were some deep pockets. The Times bulked up its Metro staff even more.

This was a war of attrition, and wars of attrition are expensive. The Times Mirror Co. began to grow impatient. Circulation for New York Newsday reached 300,000 during the Daily News strike before slipping to 231,000—still impressive, but far behind the Daily News, which hit 750,000 post-strike.

Then there was a deep self-inflicted wound, one that brought the paper unwanted national attention and was especially painful for a place that succeeded in being ethnically and gender-diverse and sought to meld old-school reporting chops with modern sensibilities. In a way it foreshadowed schisms between young and old in some newsrooms today.

In May 1990, Breslin wrote a column poking fun at his wife, a highly respected city politician. It began: “I hate official women!” Ji-Yeon Yuh, a young reporter in the Queens bureau, sent Breslin a note on the old ATEX computer system criticizing it. Yuh copied Forst.

Enraged, Breslin burst out of his office at 2 Park Avenue and launched into a tirade, calling Yuh a “yellow cur,” among other things, and reportedly using an anatomical term that, amazingly, could be considered even more offensive.

A group of reporters, young and of color, met with management and demanded that Breslin be suspended. At least a few expressed red-hot rage, according to a Los Angeles Times article about the episode (that’s how far the story spread). At the same time, more senior staffers defended Breslin and criticized Yuh for copying the boss: such differences, they suggested, had been resolved reporter-to-reporter in city rooms of yore.  

Initially, Forst and the other editors declined to punish Breslin—it was, they said, a first offense—but then he went on The Howard Stern Show and seemingly made light of the situation. He got hit with a two-week suspension. His apology began: “I am no good and once again I can prove it.”

Arce, for one, gave the bosses credit for at least sitting down with the aggrieved but more junior staffers, unusual for the time.

But the damage was done. Breslin was almost never in the newsroom again. I saw him from time to time out on stories, including during the Crown Heights riots in the summer of ’91, when he was set upon by a group of protesters who beat him and stripped him of his pants.

By 1994, Times Mirror’s frustration with the paper and the company’s naggingly low stock price had reached new levels. Roughly $100 million had been spent so far, with profitability a few years off (at the very least). 

Mark Willes, a Mormon and former head of General Mills with no newspaper experience and little love for New York City, became CEO, with a mandate to cut costs and drive up revenue. By the summer of ’95, rumors were rampant at 2 Park that we were doomed. The editors drew up a plan to keep the place going with a smaller staff. (By then I’d moved to police headquarters, where, among other duties, we produced a tally of each day’s gun homicides under the heading “The Toll.” No one would tell me if I was going to make the cut.)

Forst, talking to a writer for the Times, said it was possible the paper would be closed, inadvertently handing the reporter his lede. Forst came under heated criticism for this slip, but I admired this—he told me afterward that, because he sent out reporters every day to ask tough questions, he felt he had to be honest when he got asked one; I wish that more of today’s news executives would do the same.  

Finally, in July, Willes and the Times Mirror management team came to visit. They took a helicopter ride around the city and toured the newsroom, chatting amiably with staffers. The next day the Newsday executives prepared to present their slimmed-down plan. But Willes stopped them: forget it, the paper would close. Editors had one more day to put out a fittingly robust final edition.

Mayor Giuliani, no friend of the paper, nonetheless implored Times Mirror to let it live. Dwyer led a fiery but brief public campaign. But it was hopeless. All that was left was a final raucous night in the vault-ceilinged bar across the street, Fiori’s, gathering as colleagues for the last time. Laventhol, suffering from Parkinson’s, showed up and got a round of applause. The lights of television cameras lit our faces.

For that final edition Forst turned the tabloid page sideways and reproduced a dozen of New York Newsday’s front pages, topping it with the headline “Our Best to You.”

It was an inside joke, the last time New York Newsday would engage readers rather than beat them over the head—“Our Best to You” had been the slogan for Kellogg’s, General Mills’ archrival.

The obituaries were glowing. “It is bad enough when mediocre papers fail,” The New Yorker wrote, “but when one of the best papers in the country folds it is time for something close to despair.” Willes was called the “Cereal Killer.” But Times Mirror investors were happy. The stock went from $18 to $31 after the closure.

One footnote, perhaps apocryphal: During that fateful helicopter ride, Willes is said to have noted that he didn’t see any cranes, suggesting that no one was building in New York City. Why would anyone want to do business in a place that was clearly dying? Little did he know—little did anyone know in that hot summer of 1995—that the city was on the precipice of a new, safer, and extraordinarily affluent Gilded Age.

To me, back then, newspapers had distinct personalities: The Daily News was a desk sergeant with a heart of gold but a limited worldview; the Post a fast-talking guy you met in a bar who was really funny but whom you didn’t quite trust; the Times a middle-aged lady who enjoyed watching Masterpiece Theatre on Channel 13. And New York Newsday? I was never quite sure, and maybe that was part of the problem.

Over the decades many of those larger-than-life characters have died—Forst, Kempton, Breslin, and many others, quite a few well before their times, including Susan Forrest and Jim Dwyer.

Others remain close, working together on various journalistic endeavors, holding reunions, throwing baby showers or attending long-running book groups, testimony to the lasting camaraderie of the place. “We had a powerful network, a diverse newsroom—and a lot of fun in a profession that isn’t so much fun anymore,” said Liz Willen, who now runs the Hechinger Report, an education news site. Among her board members is Nick Chiles, a former colleague from 2 Park Ave. 

I went on to the Daily News and then the Times. In time they became my homes, my families outside my family, and the halcyon days of Laventhol’s Folly faded. Still, every now and then, on busy mornings like September 11 or in early COVID times, or during this year’s mayoral election, I find myself wondering…

What ever became of all the stories that New York Newsday wasn’t here to write?

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