Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid
OK, you’re right. It’s a terrible title. My original choice was Alicia’s Toy. There’s a story behind that.
Writing a book about a newspaper, while you are still employed there, is a bad idea. The authors of most newspaper histories once worked for the paper they are chronicling, but by the time they write the book, they have white hair, a pension, and a bit of independence. In contrast, my editors asked me to write this history when I was in my early forties, with a couple of decades of employment remaining at Newsday—or so I hoped. That meant that, once I had written an honest book about the paper, I’d have to walk the same hallways as some of the people I was writing about. Gulp! But I agreed to do it, for two reasons:
First, I’m into obedience. When a boss asks me to do something that’s not illegal or immoral, something that doesn’t involve homicide or rooting for the Yankees, I tend to do it—though I have been known to gripe a little bit in the process.
Second, I was fascinated with the prospect of reporting and writing about Alicia Patterson, who founded Newsday, along with her husband, Harry F. Guggenheim. One major idea behind the paper was this: Alicia would learn how to be a newspaper publisher at this inconsequential little suburban daily, started in a former auto dealership, and she’d eventually take over the New York Daily News from her father, Joseph Medill Patterson. Though that plan didn’t work out, for reasons you can learn by reading the book, her friends called her rickety new publication “Alicia’s Toy.” That seemed a perfect book title. But no. The folks at William Morrow, the publisher, wanted a title with the word Newsday in it.
The origin of the subtitle is another story. It came from a serial killer named David Berkowitz. As he was terrorizing the City of New York in the late 1970s, and police were looking desperately to find him, the tabloids dubbed him “Son of Sam.” Early in my time as Albany bureau chief for Newsday, I got a call from the state’s Department of Correctional Services, asking if I’d like to interview Berkowitz at the Attica Correctional Facility. It turned out that Berkowitz had requested the interview, in order to clear up some misunderstandings about his crimes.
At Attica, I asked Berkowitz why he had chosen Newsday and the New York Times, along with the Associated Press, for the interview. He answered that he considered us respectable—or maybe he said responsible—tabloids. That phrase stuck with me, in part because it was amusing to think of what the folks at the Times might think to hear their lordly publication called a tabloid, with all the sleaziness that word entails. Also, though Newsday was a tabloid in shape, it wasn’t a tabloid in spirit. An editor of the Daily News, in fact, famously referred to Newsday as “a tabloid in a tutu,” meaning that it simply lacked the adventurous spirit, the vividness, of its urban cousins, such as the News and the New York Post. So that’s how the phrase “respectable tabloid” got into the title of the book.
It took a lot of work: 900 interviews with about 600 people. But, like most books of journalistic history—except for those about the Times—it didn’t exactly become a best-seller. My wife tried her best, by moving a book written by Barbara Bush’s dog (easily the smartest member of that family) to the back of the store—and moving mine to the front. It didn’t take the store’s clerks long to figure out this ploy and restore my book to the position of obscurity that they figured it deserved. But I now have my revenge. I'm going to give you this link to my Newsday book. You'll have to find the dog’s book yourself.
Writing a book about a newspaper, while you are still employed there, is a bad idea. The authors of most newspaper histories once worked for the paper they are chronicling, but by the time they write the book, they have white hair, a pension, and a bit of independence. In contrast, my editors asked me to write this history when I was in my early forties, with a couple of decades of employment remaining at Newsday—or so I hoped. That meant that, once I had written an honest book about the paper, I’d have to walk the same hallways as some of the people I was writing about. Gulp! But I agreed to do it, for two reasons:
First, I’m into obedience. When a boss asks me to do something that’s not illegal or immoral, something that doesn’t involve homicide or rooting for the Yankees, I tend to do it—though I have been known to gripe a little bit in the process.
Second, I was fascinated with the prospect of reporting and writing about Alicia Patterson, who founded Newsday, along with her husband, Harry F. Guggenheim. One major idea behind the paper was this: Alicia would learn how to be a newspaper publisher at this inconsequential little suburban daily, started in a former auto dealership, and she’d eventually take over the New York Daily News from her father, Joseph Medill Patterson. Though that plan didn’t work out, for reasons you can learn by reading the book, her friends called her rickety new publication “Alicia’s Toy.” That seemed a perfect book title. But no. The folks at William Morrow, the publisher, wanted a title with the word Newsday in it.
The origin of the subtitle is another story. It came from a serial killer named David Berkowitz. As he was terrorizing the City of New York in the late 1970s, and police were looking desperately to find him, the tabloids dubbed him “Son of Sam.” Early in my time as Albany bureau chief for Newsday, I got a call from the state’s Department of Correctional Services, asking if I’d like to interview Berkowitz at the Attica Correctional Facility. It turned out that Berkowitz had requested the interview, in order to clear up some misunderstandings about his crimes.
At Attica, I asked Berkowitz why he had chosen Newsday and the New York Times, along with the Associated Press, for the interview. He answered that he considered us respectable—or maybe he said responsible—tabloids. That phrase stuck with me, in part because it was amusing to think of what the folks at the Times might think to hear their lordly publication called a tabloid, with all the sleaziness that word entails. Also, though Newsday was a tabloid in shape, it wasn’t a tabloid in spirit. An editor of the Daily News, in fact, famously referred to Newsday as “a tabloid in a tutu,” meaning that it simply lacked the adventurous spirit, the vividness, of its urban cousins, such as the News and the New York Post. So that’s how the phrase “respectable tabloid” got into the title of the book.
It took a lot of work: 900 interviews with about 600 people. But, like most books of journalistic history—except for those about the Times—it didn’t exactly become a best-seller. My wife tried her best, by moving a book written by Barbara Bush’s dog (easily the smartest member of that family) to the back of the store—and moving mine to the front. It didn’t take the store’s clerks long to figure out this ploy and restore my book to the position of obscurity that they figured it deserved. But I now have my revenge. I'm going to give you this link to my Newsday book. You'll have to find the dog’s book yourself.
Parish!
A mixed marriage got this book started. When I was covering the religion beat, my editor was Phyllis Singer. She is Jewish, and she was married to Ed Lowe, a Catholic. Phyllis was curious about all things Catholic. So she asked me to write a series about daily life in a Catholic parish. (Ed and I had a bit of history together. On The Newsday Magazine, I was nominally his boss, and together we hosted an interview show on Telecare, the TV network of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. Ed died in 2011.)
As I told Phyllis, there are parishes and there are parishes. Some are so lifeless that spending a year in one of them would be painful for me—and the readers. So I spent some time making calls about what parish might by worth following intensely for a year or more. Happily, I settled on St. Brigid’s, a vibrant, diverse parish in Westbury. For more than a year, I spent a lot of time there, getting to know the parishioners and exploring their spirituality. I did write other stories during that time, but my editors made it possible for me to devote most of my reporting and writing time to St. Brigid’s. My friend Ken Spencer, a great genius photographer, spent a lot of that time with me, providing some glorious images. The result was a series of stories that ran roughly once a month—with sharp but gentle editing by Judy Cartwright, for which I'm eternally grateful.
One of my regular readers, it turned out, was Lynn Schmitt Quinn, the managing editor of the Crossroad Publishing Company. She thought the series would make a good book, and she pitched that idea to her colleagues. To them, it looked like a worst-seller in the making. So they politely said no. Then, unaccountably, the Pulitzer thing happened, and her colleagues decided they should publish it after all. My editors allowed me some time to turn the series into a book, and the result was Parish! Here’s the Amazon link.
One of the great benefits of the book was the long friendship that Judy and I enjoyed with Lynn and her husband, Bill Quinn, who cared for her tenderly in her long illness. She was a lovely, kind, and deeply spiritual woman, and she died far too young.
As I told Phyllis, there are parishes and there are parishes. Some are so lifeless that spending a year in one of them would be painful for me—and the readers. So I spent some time making calls about what parish might by worth following intensely for a year or more. Happily, I settled on St. Brigid’s, a vibrant, diverse parish in Westbury. For more than a year, I spent a lot of time there, getting to know the parishioners and exploring their spirituality. I did write other stories during that time, but my editors made it possible for me to devote most of my reporting and writing time to St. Brigid’s. My friend Ken Spencer, a great genius photographer, spent a lot of that time with me, providing some glorious images. The result was a series of stories that ran roughly once a month—with sharp but gentle editing by Judy Cartwright, for which I'm eternally grateful.
One of my regular readers, it turned out, was Lynn Schmitt Quinn, the managing editor of the Crossroad Publishing Company. She thought the series would make a good book, and she pitched that idea to her colleagues. To them, it looked like a worst-seller in the making. So they politely said no. Then, unaccountably, the Pulitzer thing happened, and her colleagues decided they should publish it after all. My editors allowed me some time to turn the series into a book, and the result was Parish! Here’s the Amazon link.
One of the great benefits of the book was the long friendship that Judy and I enjoyed with Lynn and her husband, Bill Quinn, who cared for her tenderly in her long illness. She was a lovely, kind, and deeply spiritual woman, and she died far too young.
Days of Intense Emotion
This book resulted from yet another journey to a place that my work for Newsday allowed me to visit over the years. This time, it was the Holy Land. In 2000, Pope John Paul II made an historic pilgrimage there, and Newsday sent Paul Moses and me to cover it, with our Middle East bureau chief, Matt McAllester. In my years on the religion beat, I covered John Paul more than once, and it was always more than a little stressful. This pilgrimage was no exception. I obsessed over every logistical detail, such as my anxiety-inducing odyssey from the West Bank to the Mount of the Beatitudes to Nazareth. The experience proved to me definitively that I could never have been a foreign correspondent.
Happily, Paul Moses was there to calm me down. We were the journalistic odd couple: anxious, OCD Bob and preternaturally calm and centered Paul. When we got back home, it was Paul’s idea that we write a book based on our reporting for Newsday. As it happened, I had a connection with Emilie Cerar at Resurrection Press, a small Catholic book publisher on Long Island, and she quickly agreed to publish it. We managed to get it written in about four months. It was a small book, and it didn’t make the best-seller list, but Paul and I remain proud of it. Here’s the Amazon link.
Happily, Paul Moses was there to calm me down. We were the journalistic odd couple: anxious, OCD Bob and preternaturally calm and centered Paul. When we got back home, it was Paul’s idea that we write a book based on our reporting for Newsday. As it happened, I had a connection with Emilie Cerar at Resurrection Press, a small Catholic book publisher on Long Island, and she quickly agreed to publish it. We managed to get it written in about four months. It was a small book, and it didn’t make the best-seller list, but Paul and I remain proud of it. Here’s the Amazon link.