The holiday season marked my 50th anniversary at the New York Post.
Journalists rarely stay with the same newspaper for ten years, let alone half a century. In 1972, when I first walked into the ink-and-ash-stained, fetid newsroom of the Post at 210 South Street, it wasn’t typical.
My loyalty to “America’s oldest daily newspaper, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801” and that loyalty has a story behind it. But it’s a story within a larger story. After 50 years of turmoil and at least four of his near-death experiences, the New York Post had an equally improbable survival.
The owner has changed 4 times since my first day on the job. The Big Apple, on the other hand, has changed so dramatically that the city of 20 years ago is difficult for young people and new arrivals to understand. Much less, in the 1990 peak homicides he had 2,245 murders (compared to 434 in 2022).
The post, which has always been attuned to the city’s changing fortunes, has sparked corruption in the corridors of city hall and corporate power. It challenged the orthodoxy of the dominant left-wing liberal. And it has defied death over and over again, mocking detractors who predict our doom.
No episode in our turbulent history has ever matched the two-month long Carnival of the winter of 1993. The post was under the control of his two fanatics.
Both men later went to prison. But first, we at Posties endured abuse that culminated in the famous staff uprising on March 13, 1993. I stood with a colleague in the publisher’s office and met face-to-face with Hirschfeld, who had planned to consolidate all six of his floors, from delivery trucks to newsrooms, into his one floor.
A New York Times photo showed me and my late colleague Mark Karek defiantly pointing to Hirschfeld. The next day’s images helped solidify the staff’s resolve and paved the way for Rupert Murdoch’s return.
Murdoch first bought the newspaper in 1976 and then sold it in 1988 because of federal media regulations, but when I first came to the Post in the last icy week of 1972, he was on the horizon. I was nowhere. -Favorites, a favorite read in response to overwhelmingly Democratic readership. Page was assembled in a dingy editing room, with the moans of his 19th-century linotype machine hammered into his steel page frame.
The newsroom was a cloud chamber of cigar and tobacco smoke. The first newsroom computer wasn’t seen until 1978 when a giant 18-inch-long “video display terminal” displayed stories in his 4-by-5 rectangle.
In April 1983, while in editor-in-chief Roger Wood’s office, newsroom editor Vincent Musset wrote what would become the most famous headline in the city’s history: “Headless bodies in topless bars.” I stopped by with the idea of I told my friends that moments like that made it so much more fun to leave the place.
I’ve held so many roles under so many different owners and editors and have been able to switch jobs without the hassle of going to an interview.
Bosses and colleagues were a colorful group. Wood called all women “nice guys” and all men “dear boys”. (This was a long time ago.) For Frank Devine, the father of columnist Miranda Devine, who worked for both Murdoch and Carikow, each owner was just an “owner.” Former television executive Jerry Nachman ran the conference as if he were on CBS News. “Counterprogramming!” he yelled at the troops.
Former Editor-in-Chief Colonel Alan’s midnight e-mail burned our hard drives. But the day the Post finally overtook his news circulation in 2006, we cheered loudly as he triumphantly entered Langans, a local pub.
Fearless Metro editor Steve Dunleavy was listening over the phone for orders from our “Branch of Langan”. Meanwhile, three female staff who call themselves witches. I dated one of them and remained under a spell for years after her death.
Hired as a copy boy for the City Room, I slipped into the entertainment department. As a copy editor, I cleaned up crime bulletins submitted by reporters with a deadline of 5 editions a day.
But one time, when I was still commissioning the work, I failed to notice that the evidence headline was missing an important word, so I wrote that the politicians of the 1970s had pleaded guilty instead of guilty. It was written. No Guilty. I thought it was my last day in the newspaper business. But my boss put me at ease.
I was the slowest and worst page designer since Benjamin Franklin’s printing house, but miraculously, I landed jobs at the top of the entertainment, feature, and business sectors.
My assignment coincided with an important time. For example, in the field of entertainment, a fortunate event made my name clear when Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov brought his classic ballet to the masses in the 1970s. My first byline story — about the Joffrey Ballet star who founded a new company — was briefly posted on the sidewalk outside City Center on West 55th Street. They put it there because no actual ballet critic thought the news was as important as writing it. carry over to
During the 1980s Wall Street go-go era, I ran a business page. We got word that an unnamed junk bond trader named Michael Milken was effectively in control of Wall Street with investment banker Drexel Burnham Lambert, and reworked the cover of the section to meet the deadline. Shouting “Hurry up, hurry up” to a frightened reporter, he delayed his 750,000-copy press run by an hour. No one seemed to care. The scoop came first.
I oversaw our gossip column at a time when life-sized figures like Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley were strutting like colossus in the media. My friends thought my job was attractive. Cindy Adams’ myriad scoops made it fun, like when she and Hillary Clinton were kicked out of a club in 1997. But it was often heartbreaking.
Society columnist Susie (real name Eileen Maele) writes about a gala she supposedly attended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, none of the bold-faced attendees she mentioned were actually spotted: Suzy turned in her column from Anguilla, and she was counting on the invite list a week in advance. She said, “She must have been a masquerade,” I gamely defended her.
Shortly after we moved to uptown Rockefeller Center in 1995, Renée Zellweger burst into our 6th Avenue lobby and said that Page 6 items had made her voice “slutty.” complained. Page Six chief Richard Johnson went down to hear her story. He later said, “We need a booth in the lobby so the lawyers don’t call.”
In 1998, I took the position of restaurant critic. The city’s cured food stores barely took notice of me until 2000, when French megastar annihilated his chef Alain Ducasse’s new restaurant, ADNY. It was, I wrote, “the most arrogantly launched restaurant in the history of the world.”
My blunt attack on the most famous chef on the planet has sparked admiration and outrage from The New York Times to Paris TV shows.
A detractor once called me “Jack of all rants.”
I was most satisfied with the coverage of the city’s recovery from 9/11. I called for a speedy reconstruction of the World Trade Center, despite many “experts” insisting that the 16 acres be used for affordable housing. Even former 9/11 hero Rudy Giuliani wanted the site to remain empty as a memorial. Numerous stories and columns were then exhibited on the walls of his AIA Architecture Center in LaGuardia Place.
The Three World Trade Centers have received significant assistance from me in their time of dire need. The 80-story skyscraper had the Port Authority over financing for the rest of the construction of the tower, and he was stuck on the 7th floor.
An article I wrote on March 17, 2014, “Bad Idea to Block the Three World Trade Center Agreements,” caught the attention of former Governor George Pataki. Larry Silverstein received a loan guarantee. The story is built into a private display where developers keep the history of the Trade Center on the top floor of the tower.
Like many of my generation, you see this when you walk past a Times Square “newsstand” that doesn’t sell newspapers. But nothing in the print age can match the immediacy of response and wider exposure that digital transmission enables.
A satirical column I wrote last summer about New Yorkers stupid enough to move to Florida had nearly 400,000 online page clicks. About 500 readers have posted comments on our site. Hundreds of emails confirmed that I was nervous. Dozens of other media outlets linking to the column extend its reach immeasurably. On top of all this, 160,000 printed copies are published daily.
Thirty years ago, such a column might have drawn an editor a dozen letters and a few sullen phone calls.
Librarians once looked through microfilms to unearth old stories. Today, anyone can use his nypost.com search box to dig up all the words he and other post writers have submitted since December 1998.
At a recent dinner with my friend and former Post Edit page editor Bob McManus, I needed to change an article I submitted that afternoon. It took me a minute to do it on my iPhone.
“It was a lot easier than when I went to the composition room,” I said. Bob agreed.
But deep down, nothing had changed. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in his founding proclamation, we were still reporters and editors doing our best to “spread the right information on all interesting subjects to the people.”
Today we call it “Speaking Truth to Power”. It’s been a half-century adventure, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
Please give me another 50 years.
