The Press: 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 They have been replaced by younger specialists who are expert on such subjects as urban affairs, education and municipal finance.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.