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Newsday is easily the nation's best suburban newspaper. Only 33 years old, it has grown up and prospered with Long Island. Its tabloid format is an innovative blend of newspaper and newsmagazine. The contents conform: heavy on interpretive reporting and features, light on spot or breaking news stories that commuting readers have already seen in the Manhattan press or heard on their car radios. Newsday combines solid local coverage with ambitious national and international undertakings. It invested a year of reporting, for instance, to produce a sophisticated 13-part feature called "The Real Suburbia." (Among its findings: suburban housewives "overwhelmingly" say they are happy rather than bored or lonely, most new residents are not driven away by city problems but are attracted to suburban living.)
Owned by the Times-Mirror Co., which also publishes the Los Angeles Times, Newsday takes an independent political line. But in recent years it has been no friend to the Republicans. A 1971 series by the paper's investigative team (whose trophy room contains 17 top awards, including three Pulitzers) concluded that some of Bebe Rebozo's financial "deals" had "tarnished the presidency." Perhaps as a result, White House Correspondent Martin Schram was excluded from the President's China trip, and Publisher William Attwood, Editor David Laventhol and Robert Greene, who led the investigation, were all treated to IRS audits of their tax returns. On its way to becoming a paper of national influence, Newsday has also built an enviable economic base; it now carries more advertising linage than any of New York City's three dailies.
THE NEW YORK TIMES Morning (circ. 940,027) and Sunday (1,508,116).
There is no other U.S. daily quite like the Times. Its total news staff is by far the largest (about 650), its scope and coverage the most exhaustive, its influence on national and world leaders daunting—as its publication of the Pentagon papers demonstrated.
But under A.M. ("Abe") Rosenthal, 50, managing editor since 1969, the Times has loosened up and varied both its appearance and its coverage. Boxed and horizontal layouts now interrupt the long gray columns of old. Perhaps the single most important innovation is the Op-Ed page, an editorial feature that the Times did not invent; characteristically, though, its Op-Ed page, introduced in 1970, quickly became a model national forum of contrasting ideas and attitudes. The section is now edited by Charlotte Curtis, 45, who had previously transformed the Times's routine women's page into a sophisticated minidaily on modern living styles.
Lately, too, there has been a greater range in the newspaper's tone. John Corry's thrice-weekly column on moods and minutiae of the city is occasionally sentimental, but it is fresh, impressionistic reportage. With a welcome minimum of liberation cant, Judy Klemesrud and Deirdre Carmody have unearthed an impressive number of offbeat stories about how women's lives are changing. Lesley Oelsner has done expert law reporting on such complex issues as court challenges and sentencing and the juvenile justice system.