Press: The Ten Best U.S. Dailies

Through their enterprise and style, they set a journalistic standard

When TIME last chose the ten best U.S. dailies, in 1974, it seemed a buoyant era for newspapers: by publishing the Pentagon papers and exposing the Watergate scandal, they had recaptured the role as journalism’s leader, which TV had assumed during the Viet Nam War. They had shown a new zeal for investigating local corruption. And they had begun to adopt technologies to achieve crisp graphics and photos; a growing number were using color.

For American newspapers, however, the past decade has turned out to be both the worst and the best of times. While dozens of big and small city dailies were dying, a new pattern of nationwide distribution was being born, at least for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a jazzy upstart, USA Today. While the expansion of TV newscasts cut into papers’ influence, the print reporter’s education, status, wages—and expertise-reached new heights. Although a post-Watergate arrogance infected some journalists, many others learned to operate with sensitivity and restraint. If print journalists were villains in an Oscar-nominated movie, Absence of Malice, they were the heroes in an Emmy-winning TV series that ran five seasons, Lou Grant.

Chains continued to buy up U.S. dailies, large and small, during the past ten years, but despite fears of bland homogenization, the average local paper generally grew better. The biggest group, Gannett (85 dailies), has shifted emphasis from moneymaking boosterism to enterprising reporting. Old-fashioned women’s pages have given way almost everywhere to trend-conscious life-style reporting. There has also been a sharp upswing in the quality of stories about the arts and popular culture, especially television. In addition to their own. resources, moreover, daily editors now have a broader range of syndicated news and features to choose from, including stories from reporters at eight of the journals that made this year’s list of the ten best (the exceptions: the Des Moines Register and the St. Petersburg Times).

One of the dailies that TIME named among the nation’s ten best in 1964, the Cleveland Press, folded in 1982. Still, a measure of the basic health and diversity of American newspapers is that only three of the dailies on this year’s list, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, were selected by TIME 20 years ago. Among the credentials that TIME took into account: imaginative staff coverage of regional, national and foreign issues; liveliness in writing, layout and graphics; national impact achieved through general enterprise, command of some particular field of coverage or a track record of training top-rank younger journalists.

Some worthy papers might qualify for more national influence if they were not overshadowed by even better nearby competitors. The San Jose Mercury News (circ. 245,000) and Sacramento Bee (circ. 219,000) are outranked as voices of the West by the Los Angeles Times. The Orlando Sentinel (circ. 213,000) is one of the better papers in the country but places only third among Florida’s dailies. Baltimore’s venturesome Sun and Evening Sun (combined circ. 349,000), with a fine political staff and seven foreign bureaus, gamely fight against the Washington Post. Long Island’s vigilant and bright Newsday (circ. 525,000), which was on TIME’S 1974 list, gives the New York Times a stiff battle in local and state coverage. Other regional papers simply cannot overcome the limited newsiness of the areas they cover. That description applies to such praiseworthy dailies as the Milwaukee Journal (circ. 303,000), the Louisville Courier-Journal (circ. 178,000)—both on TIME’S 1974 list— and to North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer (circ. 177,000).

Two cities are particularly well served by a journalistic phenomenon that is sadly in decline: local daily competition. In Dallas, the Morning News (circ. 336,000) and Times Herald (circ. 270,000), both of which were somewhat listless until a few years ago, have spurred each other to make the city one of the best covered in the country. In Detroit, similarly happy results have come from the face-off between the Free Press (circ. 635,000) and News (circ. 651,000).

In this era of improvement, choosing America’s ten best daily newspapers is pleasantly difficult. Here, in alphabetical order, is TIME’S review of them:

The Boston Globe

For nearly a century, the Globe was undistinguished even by the standards of Boston, a notoriously bad newspaper town. Thomas Winship, who took over as editor in 1965, has transformed the Globe into a feisty, eccentric, unpredictable paper that wavers, from day to day and even from page to page, between brilliance and bathos. Under Winship the paper has won eleven Pulitzer Prizes, two last week. Characteristically, however, almost all the Pulitzers have been for issue crusades, local investigative projects, or opinion, and only one has been for coverage of breaking local news, which remains perhaps the Globe’s chief weakness.

The Globe is best when assaying politics, at which it has few peers outside New York and Washington, and sports, at which it may have no peers at all. Editorial Page Editor Martin Nolan has given the opinion columns the same grace and punch he gave the paper’s Washington bureau, and Washington Reporters Tom Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie are highly respected. Baseball Writer Peter Gammons may be that sport’s most influential daily chronicler. Among other assets: Columnist Ellen Goodman, Humorist Diane White, Music Critic Richard Dyer and Editorial Writer Kirk Scharfenberg.

But the paper is at a crossroads. Winship, 63, is due to retire next year, and his successor must determine whether to discipline the Globe at the risk of diminishing its undeniable heart. Still too much a writer’s paper, the Globe may need a sterner master in its next phase than the puckish, avuncular Winship.

Chicago Tribune

To critics, the Tribune is the Baby Huey of American newspapers—big, awkward, musclebound, stumbling over its own vast strength. Consistently profitable and increasingly dominant in the nation’s third largest city, the paper employs 530 full-time editorial staffers, including 16 correspondents in Washington, eight in other U.S. cities outside Illinois, and four abroad. Yet for a paper of its visibility, the Trib has too little impact outside its region. The staff shares the industry’s enthusiasm for blockbuster features, which tend to be deftly written and slickly packaged rather than penetrating. Says Journalism Director Neale Copple of the University of Nebraska: “The paper is solid but not very exciting.”

The Tribune has shed almost completely a tradition of Midwestern Republican dogmatism, and it covers Chicago’s tumultuous Democratic machine fairly. Among the paper’s stars are Columnists Bob Greene, who specializes in offbeat portraits of ordinary people, and Mike Royko, a Chicago institution who jumped to the Trib along with about a dozen others when Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdoch took over its tabloid rival, the Sun-Times.

Editor James Squires, 41, a former Washington bureau chief who returned to the Trib in July 1981 after a five-year stint as top editor of the company-owned Orlando Sentinel, sees himself as the paper’s “biggest fan and most severe critic.” He has brought verve and consistency to layouts, unified the scattershot staffs, and pressured editors to ensure communication between reporters covering related stories—a problem at other dailies. Vows Squires: “We are coming into our own as an investigative paper.”

The Des Moines Register

For about a month every four years, the Register rises into the ranks of the nation’s most influential dailies. Then, after the Iowa presidential caucuses are over and the bandwagon of national political reporters moves on to other states, the paper resumes its normal role as one of the state’s most powerful and respected institutions. Billed truthfully if somewhat immodestly as “the newspaper Iowa depends upon,” the Register circulates in all 99 counties, and it relentlessly stresses the local angle in news events. Says former Washington Post Ombudsman William Green: “It is enormously influential in its state.” The paper is the nation’s best in reporting about agribusiness. Farming-related stories won two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1976 and 1979, for Washington Bureau Chief James Risser, and earned his colleague George Anthan a top 1983 award from the National Press Club.

The Register’s weaknesses include drab coverage of culture and lifestyles, dismally cluttered section fronts and dim, grainy photos. Although Editor James Gannon, 44, is highly regarded as a political analyst and Corporate President Michael Gartner, 45, is a syndicated columnist on language and usage, much of the writing in the Register is flat. One notable exception: the paper’s strongly worded editorial page. During the past couple of years, the paper has been burdened by corporate skirmishing among the owners, the Cowles family.

The Register is perhaps not an automatic choice for the top ten, but as a monopoly newspaper it has resisted the temptation to laziness. It has targeted its resources to achieve national impact. And perhaps the best measure: it is trusted deeply by the people who read it every day.

Los Angeles Times

As sprawling as the city it covers, the Los Angeles Times is known to local wits as the “gray whale.” Fired with ambition to have their product regarded as equal in scope and weight to the New York Times and Washington Post, Times editors appear to have all but given up on editing: stories go on seemingly forever. Southern California’s prosperity, which was reflected in a nation-leading total of 154.4 million lines of advertising last year, has ballooned the paper to an average of 111 pages daily, vs. 96 for the New York Times. Each edition is chockablock with lovingly crafted explorations, of subjects ranging from the education of a TV anchor to the buying patterns of Hispanic migrant workers, that jump confusingly from page to page after page. At its best, the Times can be as informative and interpretive as any daily in the English language. At its worst, it seems to reflect a mistaken notion that readers want to spend all day with it.

The paper’s editorial staff numbers 668 full-time journalists, and the Times maintains 13 U.S. bureaus and 22 abroad. It also produces eight local zoned editions. Eight reporters were assigned to the Iowa presidential nominating caucuses; ten writers and four photographers were sent to the scene when a sniper attacked children at a Los Angeles elementary school. But the Times has room for individual stars. Interestingly, for a paper with a heritage of partisan Republicanism, some of them are candidly liberal. Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson leads a savvy staff; Editorial Cartoonist Paul Conrad is a blunt critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Under Editor William Thomas, 59, the Times has become known as a desirable place for writers to work. But it does not always seem to be put together with readers in mind. When the Times was ranked in the ten best list a decade ago, TIME said: “It gives the impression of just falling short of its great potential.” In some ways it still does.

The Miami Herald

There might seem to be more than enough news in south Florida to occupy any newspaper: a restive black community, an assertively bilingual Cuban population, an infestation of gun-wielding drug dealers, banks that accept large deposits in cash, a police department that seems prone to provoking charges of brutality. The Miami Herald covers its parlous territory as thoroughly and fearlessly as any other city daily, whether in exposing racial discrimination in housing or in probing terrorist acts by anti-Castro Cuban exiles. But it does more. Its reportage of Latin America, aided by bureaus in Rio de Janeiro, San Salvador and, soon, Managua, is among the very best in the U.S.

On local news, the paper has been as aggressive as Chicago’s dailies were in the era of The Front Page. When a zoning series last year charged that planning principles were being subordinated to the desires of developers, the paper’s unyielding executive editor John McMullan lamented that the articles did not result in indictments. Said he: “We are proud of explanatory journalism, but a couple of convictions is a wonderful way to explain the problem.” Yet the Herald is compassionate: Associate Editor Gene Miller has won two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting in murder cases, including one in 1976 that resulted in the freeing of two innocent men convicted of a slaying.

After McMullan retired last July, some observers claimed that the Herald went soft. His powers were divided between Publisher Richard Capen, 49, who favors a less accusatory approach, and Executive Editor Heath Meriwether, 40, who spends much of his time discussing journalistic ethics in columns and at public meetings. Coverage is increasingly featurish; staff members joke that they sometimes produce “Jell-O journalism,” with the main point of a story buried beneath paragraphs of scene setting.

The paper’s columnists and specialists lag behind the newsroom. The Herald covers business adequately, especially in a weekly section that ranges up to 78 pages, but is uneven in reviewing the arts and undistinguished in writing about lifestyles. Visually it is blocky, and photos are often muddy. Its primary flaw: like many other major dailies, it suggests that being serious precludes having any fun.

The New York Times

Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal is fond of quoting an observation by Author Theodore White in his The Making of the President 1972 that whenever anyone of consequence from the terrain between Boston and Washington talks to anyone else from that part of the country, each starts with the assumption that the other has read that day’s edition of the Times. It is the most complete American newspaper, and it serves to define “all the news” for many of the country’s opinion makers by what it deems “fit to print.” In international news, science and technology, food and furnishings, above all in culture, the Times laps the field.

Rosenthal, 61, laughs triumphantly when people still refer to the Times as “the gray lady of 43rd Street.” Since he took over in 1969, the paper has been steadily reshaped, especially with the introduction of daily theme sections (Sports, Science, Living, Home and, for entertainment, Weekend). The sections have opened the paper to stories far beyond conventional news. Some are obscure; some are refreshing reminders that there are other serious pursuits besides politics. The editorial page has also shifted, under Editor Max Frankel, from fussy, civics-textbook pieties to street-smart candor.

Nonetheless, tradition, propriety and a vast sense of self-importance still weigh heavily on Times editors and reporters, as does the constricting drabness of its first-section design. Although it has its share of exemplary stylists, the Times rarely achieves the aura of spontaneity and surprise that beguiles (or infuriates) readers of the Washington Post or the Boston Globe. The prose is often institutional or, in features, cloyingly cute. Admits Rosenthal: “The paper has not much humor.” The staffs awareness of its power and responsibility has resulted in a high level of accuracy, although the editorial stance, the Op-Ed page selections and occasionally the news judgments tilt to the left.

Depth of talent is still the Times’s most enviable asset. Its prestige enables it to lure star writers from other papers to routine assignments, from which they must fight to get stories into print. Times columnists and critics automatically become figures of national prominence. Among the best are Humorist Russell Baker, Political Commentator William Safire, Drama Critic Frank Rich and Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger. But the paper’s political coverage lags behind the Washington Post’s, and its business and sports sections are both weak when compared with those at other major papers. But even with these limitations, the Times remains the nation’s paper of record. Its readers may sometimes wish it did not so self-consciously assert that rank.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Walter Annenberg sold the Inquirer in 1969 to a forerunner of the Knight-Ridder chain, the city’s dominant paper was the rival Bulletin, which advertised, more or less accurately, “In Philadelphia, nearly everyone reads the Bulletin.” The Inquirer was uncreative, undistinguished—it even employed an investigative reporter who took money to suppress stories—and in danger of dying an unmourned death.

In 1972 the paper hired Eugene Roberts, a former New York Times national editor, and over the next decade he directed one of the most remarkable turnarounds, in quality and profitability, in the history of American journalism. The paper won six consecutive Pulitzer Prizes from 1975 through 1980 in six different categories. By July 1980 the Inquirer had converted a 173,000 daily circulation gap into a small lead, and 18 months later the Bulletin folded. Roberts and his troops once again were ready. The Inquirer expanded its business and leisure coverage, the first steps in a campaign to win over former Bulletin readers. The paper also hired 95 more editorial staffers, bringing the total to some 400, and increased the news space 20%. Explains Roberts, 51: “We were aware that there would be a lot of criticism of a monopoly ownership, and we wanted to prove that we would be better rather than worse.”

The Inquirer style is exhaustive. When the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had a near meltdown in 1979, the paper assigned more than 80 staffers. Reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele spent more than a year preparing last November’s series about nuclear waste. Some readers wonder, however, why the paper also gives its in-depth treatment to the fate of the African rhinoceros. Roberts encourages his staff to be like writers for The New Yorker, relentless in pursuit of even esoteric interests. At times, the Inquirer’s self-conscious creativity has led it to shortchange local news. Says Associate Managing Editor James Naughton: “It used to be said that we covered Karachi better than the neighborhood of Kensington. But with the Bulletin gone, we are obligated to keep more of a local record.”

St. Petersburg Times

St. Petersburg (pop. 240,000) may be one of the slowest news cities in America. The median age of the population in two census districts that make up downtown is 73; life is so sleepy that the Times sometimes has to fill its local news pages with reports of kindly neighbors and lost dogs. Many editors would count themselves blessed not to contend with chronic turmoil, but the Times goes looking for news. Locally, the paper has taken on power companies, banks, oil-supply speculators, home-repair con artists and even that most sacred of cows, the University of Florida football program, the last in stories that exposed academic irregularities. Reporters Charles Stafford and Bette Orsini won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for examining opera tions of the Church of Scientology. Lucy Morgan wrote a series that tellingly demonstrated links between public officials and drug smuggling, and Peter Gallagher has written a succession of tough but balanced stories about the perils of overdevelopment. The paper is especially generous with travel budgets: the witty theater critic Tom Sabulis frequently reports from Broadway, while Foreign Editor Wilbur Landrey roves the world.

Longtime Publisher Nelson Poynter sought to preserve the paper’s high standards by creating a unique ownership arrangement: voting rights to the controlling stock belong to the top executive, who names his successor. Since Poynter’s death in 1978, that power has been held by Eugene Patterson, 60, who has paid equal attention to quality and viability: last year the parent company, which also controls Congressional Quarterly, made a profit of about $18 million, of which $4.5 million was returned to the employee profit-sharing plan.

The Times was a pioneer in its bold handling of color, graphics and design. Perhaps an even more important accomplishment is that it has been an academy for gifted reporters who hone then” craft, then move on to bigger pay and livelier cities. In the past few years, Times alumni have got showcase jobs in Denver, Dallas and Washington, and especially on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Patterson’s heir apparent, Editor Andrew Barnes, says of the exodus, “I’m told I should feel complimented, but I resent it. We’ve populated the world.”

The Wall Street Journal

Bigger in circulation than the New York Times and Washington Post put together, so confident of its following that it dispenses with comic strips, advice columnists, crossword puzzles and a sports page, the Journal is almost certainly the only U.S. newspaper that can make or lose fortunes for the people it writes about. A perverse indication of the paper’s power came last month, when the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a formal investigation into leaks to stock traders about what items were to appear in its “Heard on the Street” column. The Journal is far from complete: editors can dis miss political developments in a paragraph, and the paper’s three daily Page One stories, while almost invariably literate, are not always on top of the news. But the Journal is the only truly international American newspaper, available on the day of publication virtually everywhere in the U.S. and in separate editions in Asia and Western Europe. Its rigorous editing makes it a consistent product for readers.

Under the new team of Associate Publisher Peter Kann, 41, and Managing Editor Norman Pearlstine, 41, the Journal is becoming more inclusive and expanding the editorial staff to about 400. Says Kann: “The interests of American business people are not just in profit and loss but in government, the environment, equality in society, international affairs.” The Journal has begun to show more interest in popular culture: last year Arts Editor Manuela Hoelterhoff won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and reviews are the centerpiece of a new daily arts and leisure page. The political writing of Washington Bureau Chief Albert Hunt is elegant and informed, and it inspires the same in his 35-member bureau. The paper opens its Op-Ed columns to liberals and gadflies such as Hodding Carter and Alexander Cockburn. As a result, the Journal has won a following even among its ideological opposites. This month a cover story in the partisanly Democratic New Republic praised the Journal as “the definitive newspaper of political economy.”

The Journal is deliberately dull to look at, especially on its tombstone-like front page. Photographs appear only in advertisements, and illustration is limited to a handful of line drawings. The emphasis on copy allows the paper to cram its coverage and extensive stock and bond tables into about 22 pages of news space. Says Kann: “We recognize that the paper should not grow too big—it would lose its convenience and utility.”

Although the Journal is written essentially for the business community, and is often shrill in its editorial page conservatism, the news columns are eminently fair. Indeed, the paper is sometimes at odds with itself: the editorial page has asserted repeatedly that the Soviet Union is engaging in chemical warfare in Asia in the form of “yellow rain,” while Journal news reporting has offered other explanations for the phenomenon. The news staff takes pride in giving thorough coverage to the problems of labor and the unemployed, and in challenging the questionable practices of corporations. After Mobil Corp. President William Tavoulareas sued the Washington Post for alleged libel for saying that he “set up” his son Peter in a shipping company, the Journal reviewed the circumstances in a story that was far more careful than the Post’s but equally tough on Tavoulareas.

The Washington Post

In the wake of the Post’s courageous and successful exposure of the sins of the Nixon Administration, young reporters throughout the U.S. became so infatuated with aggressive investigation, so sure that a scandal lurked behind every closed door, that eventually a disdainful public began to comment on the “post-Watergate syndrome.” Nowhere did the syndrome take hold more than at the Post itself, and nowhere does it hold more sway. A tone of suspicion, often anger, pervades many news stories. Some political pieces sound more like editorials: a reporter’s interpretive rebuttal often appears higher in the story than the official statement he or she is rebutting, especially in stories about the Reagan Administration’s policy in Central America. The Post is often arrogant, and is so inclined to mistrust anyone who challenges a reporter’s accuracy that for months its editors ignored widespread doubts about the authenticity of Feature Writer Janet Cooke’s profile of “Jimmy,” a purported eight-year-old heroin addict; two days after the article was awarded a 1981 Pulitzer Prize, the Post belatedly announced that it was a fake.

Troublesome as such episodes have been, and wearying as its often sloppy, overwritten coverage can be, the Post remains the nation’s second most influential paper. It reaches beyond White House handouts and glamorous legislative debates to probe scandals, follies and policy debates in obscure federal agencies. In this capacity it serves as an invaluable watchdog. Columnists Mary McGrory, Richard Cohen and George Will have mastered the art of arousing emotion without overlooking ideas. The paper’s metropolitan staff brings much the same assiduity to the diverse politics of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. The Post also has a sincere commitment to helping the poor. Two reporters spent a year checking on the operators of a low-cost housing venture in Washington, and their findings will be weighed by a grand jury.

A French sociologist once remarked that the New York Times newsroom is a symphony orchestra, while the Post’s is a jazz band. That blaring, brassy, improvisational quality is most evident in the Style section, a much imitated feature that may lead with a book review one day, take a gossipy look at Embassy Row cock tail bashes the next, then weigh in with an exhaustive account of an unknown couple throwing a party to celebrate their divorce. The section, although sometimes self-indulgent and verbose, attracts much of the best prose in the Post, especially from Columnist Henry Mitchell, Feature Writer Myra MacPherson, Book Critic Jonathan Yardley and TV Critic Tom Shales. Nonetheless, the paper’s culture coverage is spotty and seems driven more by the tastes of particular Post writers than by the interests of the reader.

Like the majority of the ten best papers, the Post faces the prospect over the next several years of replacing the man who guided it to its present eminence. Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee, 62, has run the Post since 1965 and has given it much of its personality. The eventual change of command may relieve the paper of some of its combative impetuosity. With luck, it will retain its vivacity and panache.

—By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Marilyn Alva/Miami, Marcia Gauger/New York and Don Winbush/Chicago, with other bureaus