Through their enterprise and style, they set a journalistic standard
When TIME last chose the ten best U.S. dailies, in 1974, it seemed a buoyant era for newspapers: by publishing the Pentagon papers and exposing the Watergate scandal, they had recaptured the role as journalism's leader, which TV had assumed during the Viet Nam War. They had shown a new zeal for investigating local corruption. And they had begun to adopt technologies to achieve crisp graphics and photos; a growing number were using color.
For American newspapers, however, the past decade has turned out to...