Editor’s note: Remembering a New York City tabloid, shut down before its prime

I was fortunate enough in 1985 to grab a copy of New York Newsday (an offshoot of the Long Island newspaper). I was 17 and living in a home where The New York Times, Daily News and New York Post were read every day. How could we resist adding a third tabloid being sold in the city by its then-owner, the Times Mirror Co.? New York Newsday arrived and found its own place among the competition, which can be brutal in the race to be first on local news. New York Newsday also had an edge, being the first New York City paper printed in color. That first edition was a keeper.

Behind the scenes, New York Newsday launched with a young and diverse newsroom that included names that would become legendary in New York’s journalism world, like Jim Dwyer, Sheryl McCarthy, Liz Smith and Ellis Henican, as former staffer (and my former editor from the News) Wendell Jamieson pointed out last week in Columbia Journalism Review.

Jamieson wrote about the 30th anniversary of when New York Newsday was shut down on July 16, 1995, in what he described as a misguided business decision to appease and drive up the stock price for Times Mirror investors. New York Newsday had “sought to mix the solid journalism” of the Times “with the aggressively colorful coverage” of the News and Post, sometimes successfully, other times not, wrote Jamieson. Had it survived, it would have remained a formidable force, especially covering politicians. “They can thank God they don’t have New York Newsday to torture them,” Jamieson told City & State of New York politicians. Very true. Fortunately, you can leave that job to City & State these days.