New Look at the News

The New York Daily News is not only the nation's largest daily (circ. 1.9 million) but also the only tabloid left with a front page right out of The Front Page. Some recent screamers: PAL'S INFO LED TO SLAY SUSPECT; COPS TOSS BASH, HOOK 42 HOODS; and, when the White House first ruled out federal aid for New York City a month ago, FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

Feisty headlines are an old fixture at the News, which has long delighted straphangers with such morning eye-openers as SICK TRANSIT, INGLORIOUS MONDAY after a brief subway snarl-up, HE'S BARISH ON AMERICA when a young stockbroker went streaking on Wall Street, and BOOLA BOOLA, MOOLA MOOLA over a story on the earning power of Yale graduates. Inside, however, much of the News these days is new. After decades of preoccupation with ax murders, "sexsational" divorce cases and other tabloid staples, the Noo Yawk News is going respectable.

The Professor Higgins behind that transformation is Michael J. O'Neill, 53, a relaxed, linebacker-size Detroiter who joined the News as a Washington correspondent in 1956. The paper had been improving steadily even before O'Neill was named managing editor in 1968, but he is widely credited with making the first major overhaul since Chicago Tribune Co-Owner Captain Joseph Medill Patterson launched the original Illustrated Daily News in 1919. O'Neill, who was named editor last August, has split the paper into numerous local editions to improve neighborhood coverage, and retired many of the general-assignment veterans in the newsroom. They have been replaced by younger specialists who are expert on such subjects as urban affairs, education and municipal finance. Says Village Voice Political Columnist Ken Auletta: The News "is a good paper getting better."

Back Issues. Under O'Neill, the News has given more space to movie and theater criticism and added a humor columnist, Gerald Nachman, whose satire is so subtle that many longtime News readers take his spoofs seriously. When Nachman wrote that because of the nostalgia craze a fictional "Ye Olde Nostalgia Shoppe" had been so successful that it was reduced to selling back issues of PEOPLE magazine, dozens of fans wrote in asking for the address. Another O'Neill-era recruit is the paper's Washington bureau chief James Weighert, whom Political Chronicler Theodore H. White calls "maybe the best columnist out of Washington today."

O'Neill has also reduced the paper's bank of rewrite men and urged reporters to do longer stories and more investigative projects. Last week New York officials ordered a thorough reorganization of the state lottery, which had been shut down since the News exposed mismanagement in it last October. O'Neill has swung the editorial page away from its reflex conservatism. Recently, for instance, the News endorsed both New York State's equal rights amendment and a limited form of gun control -- ideas that would have made the old News see Red.

Nowhere has the News' new purposefulness been more apparent than in its coverage of the city's financial troubles. The paper was warning about runaway pension costs, one of the main factors in the present crisis, as long as four years ago, when a series of News stories persuaded the New York legislature to put a freeze on future increases in state pension-plan membership. In a recent issue of [Morel the journalism review, Financial Commentator Louis Rukeyser rated the News' editorials on the city's financial plight as more cogent and less partisan than those of the Times and the Post, which he felt too often got bogged down in anti-banker diatribes. Says O'Neill: "We try to practice what I call 'preventive journalism.' Newspapers can no longer stand by and record crises as they occur. We have to identify future problems and perhaps prevent them."

One recent problem is the paper's circulation, which is off by about 5% from last year -- a decline that O'Neill attributes mostly to a rise in the newsstand price from 10-c- a copy to 15-c-. Yet advertising is up by 800,000 lines (v. a 5 million-line drop at the Times), and the News is still a moneymaker for the Tribune Co., which also publishes the Chicago Tribune and is largely owned by descendants of Joseph Medill.

O'Neill's editorial-improvement campaign at the News has some distance to go. The paper still has only two full-time foreign correspondents (v. 30 for the Times). Its business section is a pitifully thin single daily page, and the paper could use some thoughtful columnists to supplement its brief editorials.

"When you're changing the content of a paper," says O'Neill, "it's important not to jar readers too much." The News continues to give big play to the handiwork of its 60 full-time photographers, some of whom still have a sharp lens for bikinied beauties. Says O'Neill: "We take pictures seriously." Girls, too. Said the headline on a story about New York Governor Hugh Carey's recent dinner dates with divorcee Anne Ford Uzielli: IS GUV IN LUV? IT'S NO DODGE, IT'S A FORD.

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