Newsday's Holiday

By 6:30 Thanksgiving Eve, the staff of Alicia Patterson's scrappy, prosperous (circ. 130,000) Long Island tabloid, Newsday, was well scattered, and the plant at Garden City was shut down. The paper planned to stay closed over the holiday. Then Reporter Bob Hollingsworth, who had stopped in a bar for a drink on his way home, caught a radio news bulletin. There had been a disastrous wreck on the Long Island Rail Road (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Hollingsworth tried frantically to locate Managing Editor Alan Hathway by phone, made four calls before he ran him down having dinner in a Chinese restaurant. By the time Hathway hustled back to the office, other staffers who had heard the news were also hurrying in and the list of wreck casualties was up to 50. Though the radio has just about killed off the newspaper trick of putting out extras as circulation boosters, Newsday's department heads decided to put one out "as a public service." Hathway "got the staff out of the bars and grills, the restaurants and the movies." By 11 p.m. the mechanical staff was in and 32 editorial men were working on one of the biggest local stories in Newsday's ten-year history. By 6 a.m. a 16-page extra was ready to go to press with long lists of the dead and injured plus 25 stories and pages of pictures. Within a few hours, all of the 100,000 home subscribers had their extra, and another 50,000 copies of Newsday were on newsstands. But Newsday didn't pat itself on the back for its progressive journalism. Instead, it candidly confessed that in one way it had fallen down on its journalistic job, that it had not done all it could to prevent the accident from happening. Said Newsday somberly: "We have known for years that the Long Island Rail Road was in deplorable condition. The wreck at Rockville Centre [TIME, Feb. 27] tipped us off to the dangers . . . Yet we did too little . . . People forget. And Newsday, being people, and being concerned with other such matters as politics, war economy, etc., has not lifted its voice as loudly as we might have done. All we can do is cop a plea. The job of alarm we have done has only been fair."

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