The murder of New York Newday: how Wall Street's obsession with the bottom line killed one good newspaper - and threatens others.

The Baltimore air was muggy on the night of July 20, 1995 as Mark Hinckley Willes returned to his hotel suite overlooking the harbor. The newly chosen chief executive of the Times Mirror Co., one of the country's leading newspaper companies, had just come from meetings where he had directed the executives of The Baltimore Sun to make drastic cuts in their work force. Six days earlier in Manhattan, he had issued an edict even more draconian: the killing of New York Newsday. The 10-year-old New York City daily had been a bold experiment in urban newspapering. It had cost roughly $100 million to build it into a journalistic success. As the ax fell, the paper was about to turn a profit.

I had come to the Harbor Court Hotel on that sticky night in Baltimore to ask Willes, after a mere two months in the newspaper business, how he came to his decision. I had been part of New York Newsday almost from its start and in newspapers for 36 years. I wanted Willes to justify his act.

The 54-year-old chief executive nudged his shoes onto the hotel carpet and eased his lean jogger's frame into an easy chair for the interview. "Would it surprise you to know," he began, "that I have a romantic feeling about newspapers?"

"Yes, it would," I replied. My next thought was that if his "romance" with newspapers was a sample of what was to come, this conversation was going to be a landmark moment in surrealism.

There had been nothing surreal about the announcement of New York Newsday's death just six days before. It was very real and very grim. The well-suited men in the Manhattan boardroom embodied all the plot lines in this tale of corporate homicide. The handful who had created the paper a decade ago - men who loved the gritty, messy world of journalism - had seen their influence slowly ebb away. The moment was a stark affirmation that power had passed to those who saw the world through ledgers and dividend checks, for whom pleasing the quick-return boys on Wall Street was paramount. Willes spoke for them.

The picture window behind him twinkling with Baltimore's soft night lights, Mark Willes, born and raised in Salt Lake City, pleasant of mien, well-educated, and articulate, wanted to talk about his life and his business philosophy. He had taught at the university level, served the public at the Federal Reserve Board, and then turned to "the mission of business," spending 15 years with General Mills.

He spoke in lofty terms of bringing quality to his company's newspapers. "I believe deeply and passionately in what newspapers are and what they do," he insisted. His intention was to achieve an "exquisite balance," he said, between the push for profits and the need for journalistic quality. Newspapers are a business, he said, but "a very, very special business."

New York Newsday wasn't killed because Willes worried it would run forever at a loss. It was killed because a paper of its quality was not going to earn the massive profits that would make him a hero on Wall Street. Willes hardly sought to disguise this truth. At a Times Mirror "leadership" gathering in Pasadena last September, Willes said that the closing of New York Newsday "had nothing to do with the quality of the people who were there. It had nothing to do with the quality of the effort. The journalistic product was absolutely superb. It had to do with the fact that in that market we were never going to make any money of significance."

Earning a decent and consistent rate of return wasn't enough; it had to be "money of significance" - a phrase crafted to satisfy the Wall Street traders. Indeed, Wall Street fairly burst its buttons when Willes shut down New York Newsday. ("Wall Street danced on New York Newsday's grave yesterday," wrote the New York Daily, News.) The "buy" recommendations on Times Mirror stock went out instantly, and the share price leapt upward. The winners were the majority stockholders - namely, the Chandler family of Los Angeles - who control the board of directors and who had hired Willes to increase their fortune. He did so handsomely. At this writing, the share price, which had dipped below 20 before Willes' arrival, is up around 33 - having added about a billion dollars to the Chandlers' worth.

There's nothing sinful about making money. Neither "profit" nor "capitalism" are dirty words. Businesses must earn to survive, and without entrepreneurs there would be no job growth.

The problem is, this healthy process has taken an unwholesome turn. Increasingly, the story of the modern economy is one of the corporations that make huge profits their sole raison d'etre, devaluing their ties to their employees and to the communities.

In our conversation, Willes argued that the only way a large corporation can succeed is to insist that each of its divisions produces the same level of profit - one that is equal to or beyond the industry average. But wherein lies his "exquisite balance" between quality and profits if every newspaper in the company has to earn the identical rate of return, regardless of varying market conditions in different cities and regions? In fact, his exquisite balance was nothing more than a straight line, no deviations allowed.

Surely he must have been aware that no newspaper in New York City, not even The New York Times, earns anything close to the level of operating profit (i.e. the industry average for big newspaper companies) that he is demanding. At the moment, the average is 16 to 17 percent. The Times makes less than 8 percent but is financially sound nonetheless.

And yet suddenly, pressures for greater profits are surfacing even at the Times. Discontent is being openly expressed by bottom-line, outside businessmen recently named to the board of directors, and also by some of the Ochs/Sulzbergers themselves - the family that has owned and run the Times for 100 years. The dissenters are targeting the paper's traditionally high spending on its news product and urging entry into the entertainment business. It's almost as if the moves by Times Mirror, also a prestigious newspaper company, have conferred respectability on the cutting and slashing - increasing profits at the expense of editorial quality - that such big chains as Gannett and Knight-Ridder have long been famous for. It's open season on newsroom spending. How far from there to sunset for good newspapers in America?

The Times Mirror papers - in Baltimore, Long Island, Hartford, and Los Angeles - have already seen a decline in quality. In the short run, they may show higher profit margins. But I would wager that neither their circulation nor their advertising income will increase significantly. With so many options for entertainment and information, readers may react to the decline in quality by spending their time and money elsewhere. Willes's shortsighted economic doctrine - a doctrine that seems on its way to becoming the American CEO manifesto - is not just harsh to workers and communities. It is also bad business.

Writing Their Own Obituaries

In jobs lost and lives interrupted, New York Newsday's death is no more or less important than the shuttering of an auto factory or massive layoffs at a telephone company. Still, newspapers have played a special role in American life. From the beginning, whether in frontier towns or teeming cities, newspapers have been an essential vehicle for passing on the customs and lore and standards of the nation. Today, as newspapers are killed, dumbed down, and homogenized, fewer and fewer expose the abuses of the powerful or illuminate the lives of the powerless, a handful of exceptional papers notwithstanding. New York Newsday was one of those exceptions.

Over the past decade, nearly 150 papers have shut their doors. Last year alone, besides New York Newsday, obits ran for The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Houston Post, and the News Tribune of New Jersey. One of the two Detroit papers could be next. Most of our large cities have been reduced to but one newspaper - which means only one voice, one opinion, one view of the world. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the papers that have survived are chain-owned. The independents keep losing ground.

My first taste of newspapering came when I wrote for an army weekly during my military service in Europe Afterward, in 1959, 1 went to work at The New York Times as a copyboy. In the years to follow, I covered the state government in Albany and was then posted overseas to India. Eventually, I went to Southeast Asia, where the people of Cambodia, helpless pawns in the crossfire of the Vietnam War, became my beat and my obsession.

I learned there that a reporter's life is a continuum. Cambodia's horrors were staggering, but there are horrors in America, too. We have poverty and discrimination; we have our share of public officials and private lords who rule with a callous hand. Cambodia's suffering was on a grander scale. but it's really the same basic story.

When such stories happen, good reporters - though they think of themselves and their newspapers as providing some value to the community - do not sit down at their typewriters, or now their word processors, and say to themselves: "I'm doing this as a public service." What they do is to sit down and write the story out of visceral need. It happened, and it has to be told.

You write first for yourself, to get it out of your gut. And, then, you write for the reader; you summon your craft to try to describe what you've experienced with enough skill to make others see and feel as you did. This is what Quality newspapers and newspaper people do. This is what New York Newsday did - before it was killed.

What brought me to New York Newsday was an unfortunate experience at the Times, where I had become the city editor and then started the paper's first opinion column on local affairs. In the column, I had rattled a lot of influential cages and stepped on some big toes. Some of die projects and people I criticized were supported in the paper's editorials. In July 1985, four years after I started the column, it was abruptly "discontinued." It wasn't a great day for me, or for the First Amendment, but I understood. I resigned.

Soon thereafter, David Laventhol, publisher of the Long Island paper Newsday, who was starting up its city offspring, New York Newsday, asked me to come over and write my column in a choice spot in the new paper. It would also run in the mother paper. Laventhol promised me independence, giving his assurance that no matter how controversial the topic or my commentary on it, there would be no interference. He kept his promise.

Many people had helped launch New York Newsday, but it was Laventhol's child. The Newsday publisher had conceived it virtually alone and then had lobbied and cajoled and finally sold it to his superiors at Times Mirror. They bought the idea because they knew him as an especially sound and creative newspaperman and because it made eminent sense - still does.

Newsday had become one of the country's top 10 quality dailies, with a circulation above 500,000, but Long Island was surrounded by water on three sides and its population and economy had both leveled off. So die paper had nowhere to expand but west to New York City.

Laventhol had built a reputation as an innovator, first at the late New York Herald-Tribune and The Washington Post, and then at Newsday. He also the ponies, his sharp, mathematical mind able to whiz through the racing sheets and absorb the horses' past records and finishing times. Around the office, he was known as "Clocker Dave." Indeed, it took a touch of gambler's nerve to move into a tough newspaper market like New York City, where there were already three papers.

Not long after getting the new paper up and rolling, Laventhol was plucked by Times Mirror for larger roles in the parent company. Still, he found time to watch carefully over his creation, it from detractors.

By 1987, Laventhol was Times Mirror's president. In 1989 he was given the added roles of publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, the company's flagship paper. He seemed on his way to being named the next CEO of Times Mirror - the natural successor to Robert Erburu, who was nearing retirement.

Then suddenly, in 1993, Laventhol was stricken with Parkinson's Disease. No longer strong enough to carry the same workload, he stepped down from his senior posts on Jan. 1, 1994, but remained as editor-at-large. Then 60, Laventhol told friends he was now "off to the side." His ability to protect New York Newsday had been diminished. Laventhol was worried. If his urban experiment were to be snuffed out, he knew it would not likely be attempted again at any media company.

Why was this experiment special? For starters, New York Newsday set out to cover the whole city, not just upscale Manhattan but all the boroughs, all the new immigrants, all the minorities, all the working people from housekeepers to nurses to teachers to subway motormen, all the middle class, the school children, the cops and the firefighters, the poor as well as the ruling elites, the panhandlers and the penthouse crowd. The Daily News and The New York Post were relatively downscale tabloids. And the Times was writing for the upper income brackets, mainly covering Manhattan and neglecting the city's four other boroughs, home to the new immigrants and the working class. New York Newsday sought a readership niche somewhere between these two poles.

Just as important, New York Newsday was independent. Having no history in the city, it carried no burden of sacred cows, no debts to local politicians that needed paying, no favors owed to advertisers. This gave it an immediate journalistic advantage over the three other papers, all laden with generations of such baggage.

The prospect of journalistic freedom and the romantic lure of working on an underdog, pioneering paper instantly drew to its staff a flock of talented reporters, editors, and photographers. Kate Phillips came from North Carolina, Merle English from Jamaica Edna Negron from the ranks of the city's public school teachers photographer Viorel Florescu from Romania.

Bureaus were quickly opened in the "outer boroughs" of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, some of them in storefronts where pipes leaked, and the heat was sporadic. Many of the reporters grew up in these neighborhoods; more than a few still lived in them.

There were many innovations. Dennis Duggan's subway column, for example. No New York paper had ever before covered the subways fulltime - even though this humming underground hive was a city of its own, carrying several million New Yorkers and visitors to and from the various pieces of their fives every day. An immigration reporting team was formed to chronicle the paths of the newcomers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

The rival papers regularly flattered New York Newsday by trying to imitate its innovations, but the new paper stayed ahead. A "Student Briefing Page" on current affairs - in Spanish and English - was a singular illustration of newspapers as education. It drew 30,000 letters a year. The gayworld column, written with joyous wit and candor by Frank DeCaro, also drew fresh attention. A very personal take on being a gay man in the nineties, the column was an entirely new area for a major daily newspaper.

The paper's difference and independence showed vividly in its coverage of city and state government and in its investigative work. The subjects of these stories were forever badgering Newsday's editors over the phone, demanding retractions. This became standard operating procedure for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but while the other tabloids would often bow to his demands, New York Newsday would not. When Michael Powell, the paper's City Hall bureau chief, refused to soften his aggressive coverage, his access to the mayor's press office was cut off. Unfazed, Powell kept up the pace, breaking stories about people thrown off welfare without good cause and about the impact of budget cuts that City Hall was trying to downplay.

So successfully did New York Newsday do its job that The New York Times, to protect its circulation, had to quickly expand its city staff and add pages in its metro section, at considerable cost, in an effort to match the coverage.

Providing the ruffles and flourishes for the new paper was its impressive orchestra of columnists - the paper's signature. They included the wise and venerated Murray Kempton, the sandpapery Jimmy Breslin, and the young and lilting Jim Dwyer.

In its short 10-year life, in addition to a dozen honors for reporting on education, politics, transportation, and neighborhoods, New York Newsday garnered two Pulitzers for its city journalism - one to Dwyer in 1995 for commentary and a 1992 award for the staff's coverage of die Union Square subway crash in which five people were killed and more than 200 injured. The New York Times has won just three city prizes over the entire 78 years of the Pulitzer's existence.

None of this is to suggest that the paper was perfect. Like all of us, it had flaws. For one, die paper's marketing and publicity efforts were confused and ineffective. They never identified the audience they were targeting or defined the paper that way.

Further, the editor of New York Newsday, Don Forst, though able in many ways, was wedded to the old and sensational tabloid traditions, whereas New York Newsday was, for the most part, a tabloid in size only. ( "A tabloid in a tutu," it had once been called.) Forst tended to use the front page for stories of sex, violence, celebrity gossip, bypassing and downplaying important hard news inside the paper. Many on the staff felt that potential readers were misled and put off by these covers.

In the end, though, this collection of street redid. porters was strong and determined enough to overcome the drawbacks. As in many other organizations, the foot-soldiers were ahead of the generals and carried the institution.

All in the Family

Once, Times Mirror had been a newspaper empire that was run hands - on by the Chandlers, a striving family who helped to build the city of Los Angeles in the late 19th century through hard work, scheming, and reactionary politics. Laborbashing and red-baiting were early hallmarks of the Chandler's flagship paper, the Los Angeles Times. (To this day, the paper's work force remains non-union).

In the third generation, a Chandler with modern, often liberal views emerged and took command not only of this paper but of all of Times Mirror. This was Otis Chandler: Stanford grad, racer of fast cars, surfer, and Olympic-level shot-putter. Otis developed a reputation as a risk-taker for acquiring new enterprises. In die sixties and seventies, he transformed the Los Angeles Times from a pinch-minded, mediocre newspaper into a highly regarded one with national impact.

The conservative faction of the family, numerous and influential, never liked Otis. They resented his power and fought him behind closed doors. Having tired of the struggles, Otis stepped away from power in the eighties and turned the company over to the men he had placed under him. chiefly CEO Robert Erburu.

At this, the right-wing Chandlers stirred and sought openings to reestablish their primacy. They no longer thought of their newspapers as valuable community institutions but as economic vehicles for returns and dividends. In contrast with the Sulzbergers of The New York Times and the Grahams of The Washington Post, who personally run their newspapers and have thus far remained committed to superior journalism, the Chandlers had disengaged themselves from the family business, having no taste for it. They would leave it to the professional businessmen.

But when the executives Otis had left in place made some sour financial moves, compounded by a serious recession, the family quietly encircled these men and for the first time looked outside the company for a new chief executive officer. The choice of Willes, the vice-chairman of General Mills, was a signal as clear as a trumpet call. An outsider would arrive with no luggage from the company's past, no old friends or special projects to protect, no compunctions. The expansionist and journalistic dreams of Otis Chandler and his men were to be reined in, even crushed. New, York Newsday had been the last big dream. It didn't fall - it was pushed.

In the Baltimore interview, when Willes set forth his gospel that each unit of the corporation had to produce the same high profit percentage, he said that those, like myself, who argued otherwise were advocating subsidies for weak companies. "I don't personally believe New York Newsday ever would have made any money...," he said. "[But] let's suppose that we could be marginally profitable. You're saying: Isn't it important enough to have this wonderful thing taking place in New York that the rest of the company [should] subsidize New York Newsday. And subsidize is exactly the right word."

His insistence on the word "subsidize" was hugely revealing. He was saying that any Times Mirror newspaper earning less than a 16 or 17 percent profit was losing money. But New York Newsday, judging by the numbers, had been just fiscal moments away from earning a decent profit. Not a profit of 16 or 17 percent perhaps, but a healthy one. If every U.S. company were to adopt Willes's extreme triage theories of who should live and who should die. then the "downsizing" of the American work force would be an even more virulent epidemic than it already is.

Willes saw killing New York Newsday as gutsy, "a very quick and clean decision." But some in the business world saw it instead as shortsighted. They wondered. for example. if he had considered how pivotal New York Newsday was to the long-term future of its mother paper. Newsday. By challenging the other city paper, on their own turf, New York Newsday forestalled any push by them onto Long Island to try to wrest readers from Newsday itself. The New York Times and the Daily News are expected to attempt that foray now. New York Newsday had also generated new revenue for the paper that birthed it. Advertisers were attracted by the chance to appear in both papers at little extra cost.

The synergy between Newsday and New York Newsday was never more obvious than in the days following the latter's death. Willes had decreed that roughly 800 employees had to be terminated. Since many of those staffers were shared by both papers, it meant that, quite apart from the death of its offspring, the mother paper was also being decimated. In one editor's words, "It was like being in the middle of a train wreck."

"The decision to kill New York Newsday was precipitous and wrong," said Porter Bibb, an investment banker at Ladenburg Thalmann. "They should have explored other options. But Willes is a balance-sheet guy; he has no evident vision or strategy for growth. It looks to me like he's positioning the various pieces of the company for sale in a couple of years or so." Why not seek a buyer for the paper to recoup some of the losses, Bibb and others asked? Their point was that the company had spent $100 million or more over 10 years to nurture a new enterprise to within inches of bearing fruit, and then, with profit in sight, weirdly shut it down. Worse, the shut-down costs were another estimated $80 million - mostly for the severance packages of the 800 terminated employees. Times Mirror had spent at least $180 million on New York Newsday - and had nothing to show for it. "How do you explain that as a sound business decision?" said a broker who asked not to be identified. "Now you know why I've become so cynical about this business."

When Willes was asked in the Baltimore interview why New York Newsday had been singled out for extinction when all the other Times Mirror papers had been ordered simply to downsize, he snapped: "That's a New Yorker's view of the world! You're saying there's something so special about this experiment in New York that we need to subsidize it.... You feel like New York Newsday has a divine right [to exist]." Actually, Willes's new regimen for Times Mirror wasn't all about New York, only the most vivid part. The rest of the company's papers are also reeling from new budget cuts and staff rollbacks of 15 percent and more - although in fairness, it should be acknowledged that a measure of fat did exist to be cut, notably at the Los Angeles Times. Willes went beyond that measure. In all, more than 2,000 Times Mirror newspaper jobs were lopped off by the end of 1995. New York Newsday's 800-plus was by far the biggest hit. Not surprisingly, the tensions between New York and Los Angeles had begun in the late 1980's after the stock market crash and die onset of the recession. Though slow to reach the West Coast, the downturn eventually hit Los Angeles hard. The flagship Times began losing advertising at an alarming rate. Worse, die sag in profits was happening throughout the company. A whipping boy was needed. New York Newsday became a larger and larger target.

Tabloid Wars 

New York Newsday had not always been so besieged. There were moments, in fact, when it looked as if the paper would shoot to profitability in one vaulting leap. More than once, its two tabloid rivals, the News and the Post, both ailing for years, seemed close to death. In the end, both papers survived. Rupert Murdoch, who had owned the Post earlier and sold it to an ineffectual real estate developer, suddenly re-acquired it, apparently deciding to underwrite the paper's losses so as to have his own political megaphone in the nation's information center. The News was bailed out by Mortimer Zuckerman, a wealthy developer and magazine publisher who also wanted a New York City forum. A bitter circulation war was soon raging.

As the battle heated up in 1993, New York Newsday ran into labor disputes in the pressroom; the ensuing work slowdown dropped the circulation from 275,000 to 216,000. The News and the Post delighted in writing stories about every New York Newsday stumble or setback. And each time they did, the Wall Street analysts would begin growling again about the drain on the already beleaguered Times Mirror company. And then even more stories would appear - about the analysts' views and their estimates of the paper's annual losses.

By August 1994, Robert Johnson, Laventhol's succesors as Newsday publisher, was feeling heavy pressure from Times Mirror. At a budget get meeting in Los Angeles that month, his presentation was treated curtly. "The publisher got slapped in the face," said a Los Angeles source. During this visit, according to one account, Johnson asked CEO Robert Erburu for a long-term commitment to stand by New York Newsday. What Johnson dearly wanted was a firm public statement from Times Mirror declaring that New York Newsday was here to stay. This, he believed, would end the doomsday speculation on Wall Street, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Erburu, however, was nearing retirement and was no longer in a position to give that support. An imposing man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev, Erburu had once been the unquestioned commander-in-chief of Times Mirror. But recent miscalculations and fumbles on major deals had cost the company several hundred million dollars. Members of the Chandler family were livid. They held Erburu and his top men responsible and, according to sources, complained bitterly about die size of their dividends. (Though there had been no increase since 1990, the family was nonetheless collecting about $42 million a year in dividend checks.)

Johnson's fortunes went downhill fast. His relations with Times Mirror executives became almost openly fractious. Within three months, he had been fired. The press release on November 1, 1994 said that Johnson had "resigned" because of "differences in business philosophy."

The man chosen to replace him as publisher was Raymond Jansen, a Long Islander who had been working for Newsday and then Times Mirror since his college graduation in 1960. An operations man by training, Jansen was CEO and publisher of The Hartford Courant when Times Mirror shifted him to Newsday.

There is speculation that the Times Mirror people believed that Jansen, coming as he did from the business side, would step in, look at New York Newsday's numbers and the tight city market, and quickly conclude that the paper could not be sustained - thus coming to share Los Angeles's position.

Whatever the expectations at Times Mirror, Jansen took a firm grip immediately, ordering a crash line-by-line examination of the budget to see how the costs broke down between Newsday and New York Newsday. Strangely, Johnson had never done this kind of evaluation. What Jansen found was striking. The costs had been misapportioned; New York Newsday's losses were under $5 million a year, maybe only $3 million-and were dropping. Jansen also focused sternly on the circulation decline and got readership climbing again.

Then, in May, came the announcement that Willes had been picked to replace Erburu at the top of Times Mirror. In the ninth-floor newsroom at 2 Park Avenue, the anxiety meter began vibrating again. Little was known about Willes. Reporters interviewed each other: What did it mean for New York Newsday?

Eight months into Jansen's tenure, Times Mirror scheduled a meeting for Friday, July 14, 1995 in New York. Jansen was to formally present to Willes his case for New York Newsday, along with his cost-cutting plans for making it a financial success. New York executives were nervous but remained optimistic. They believed, because of Jansen's early results and his clarifying of the profit and loss numbers, that at worst they'd face serious belt-tightening and payroll cuts.

Willes was in town a day early for the Friday meeting. On Thursday afternoon he dropped into the New York newsroom and chatted amiably with staffers as he walked around die block-sized room. One reporter, Dena Bunis, stepped forward to pin a union button on Willes's lapel. He accepted it, smiling. It said: New York Newsday: Too Smart To Die." The staff took the visit as a good sign. No man would come in here and schmooze with us and say nothing, they thought, if he were going to kill the paper the next day.

Willes insisted in the Baltimore interview that when he toured the newsroom that Thursday he had not yet made a final decision. He was being less than candid. Sources confirmed that before he left Los Angeles for New York, Willes had told the Chandler family and at least one board member of his plans. The New York Newsday staff saw his silence during his visit as a gratuitous stab. When I told him that, Willes volunteered to come back and talk to the staff. "You get me an invitation, I'll come," he said. "I'd be delighted to show up." He received the invitation. He told me personally he was coming. He never came.

As the ill-fated Friday meeting convened in Times Mirror's Manhattan office - about 20 blocks north of the newsroom - two senior Times Mirror executives, Richard Schlosberg III and Donald Wright, who some time earlier had read the writing on the wall and shifted their positions on New York Newsday, now made it official. They said that closing down New York Newsday was the right thing to do, the necessary thing. That's probably when the Newsday side realized the ax had fallen. Tony Marro, the paper's editor, argued eloquently for the New York paper's survival, explaining why Newsday's future as a quality paper on Long Island depended on it. Jansen, team leader, also spoke with passion. He told the Times Mirror group that under his strategy, the New York Newsday loss for 1995 would be down to less than $1 million, with break-even and profit foreseen in the coming year.

Oddly, Willes didn't dispute the figures. He merely said it was "not enough soon enough." In his opinion, he said, "irrational forces" were at play in the New York marketplace that would make it impossible for New York Newsday to succeed - a reference to the deep-pocketed owners of the Post and the News.

The Chandler family presence hovered over the conference table. As the holders of 54 percent of the controlling stock, they firmly controlled the board of directors. And they, through their board, had picked a CEO who would carry out their wishes.

None of the principal Chandlers would speak to me, on or off the record. This newspaper family, supposed avatars of freedom of expression, chose silence. Schlosberg and Wright, the two executives who had turned against New York Newsday, also refused to be interviewed.

Schlosberg, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and also Times Mirror's executive vice-president in charge of all the company's newspaper operations, was rewarded at the end of the year with a seat on the board of directors. The business lesson here, it would appear, is this: If you can save money by firing lots of people, even if it damages the quality of the company's product, you will be rewarded.

The Final Days

Once the death sentence was pronounced on that Friday, the day became one long theatre of roiling emotions. It had started during the meeting itself. David Laventhol, architect of New York Newsday, could not conceal his grief. Twice, tears welled and his throat closed, and he rose and left the room to compose himself.

When the meeting ended, the Newsday group headed for the newsroom on lower Park Avenue to deliver the terrible news. and unflappable, was seething. "Why did they bring me here to straighten out the place if they were going to come in and do this?" his colleagues remember him saying.

Jansen was a businessman, not a journalist-romantic who might see the ledger books through misty eyes. He had taken a hard and careful look and seen, on business grounds, that this quality product was something to be strengthened, not abandoned.

The last paper, Jansen told the staff, would be on Sunday. Jim Dwyer raised his hand and asked for 10 minutes to make the case for keeping the paper alive. "It's over, Jim," said Jansen somberly.

The staff reacted the way people usually react when they get pole-axed. Some wept, some got angry, some were traumatized. One shell-shocked reporter asked what she should do about an interview scheduled for Tuesday. A few began drinking vodka and rum straight from the bottles.

There were other scenes in the days that followed that should not be forgotten.

One involved John Arne Markussen, an adopted member of the New York Newsday staff. As the U.S. correspondent for Dagbladet, an Oslo tabloid, he worked out of leased space in the newsroom. On July 15, returning from a vacation back home in Norway, he passed a newsstand at Newark Airport and New York Newsday's headline about its own death jumped out at him.

"My first thought about what Times Mirror had done," Markussen said a few days later, "was of this saying we have in Norway, where as you know it's very cold: `[Amstrong] pisse i buksa for [Amstrong] holde seg varm.' - `Pissing in your pants for the sake of keeping warm.'

"Of course, when you do this in your pants," said Markussen, who filed a full-page story on New York Newsday's demise for Dagbladet, "you're only warm for a few minutes. Then your pants freeze."

And then there was the Stanley Asimov letter.

Asimov was a highly intelligent, lovely man who had begun at Newsday fresh out of journalism school in 1952. For the next four decades, until his retirement in 1992 after contracting a rare blood disease, he was a central figure on the paper, as journalist and then senior executive, directly involved in every major innovation.

When New York Newsday was struck down, Asimov sent an aggrieved letter to Willes. "In my 40 years at Newsday," he wrote, "I did not agree with every decision made by Newsday and Times Mirror. But on each occasion when I disagreed, I could understand the logic and judgment of the decision. Consequently, I never saw a decision that I couldn't accept. This is the first decision in my experience that was so wrong."

Willes's reply was a form letter. On August 16, one month to the day after New York Newsday's final issue, Asimov died.

"Be just, honest and moral," Mark Willes says in his entry in Who's Who in America. "Do things not only because they are required, but because they are right. Have mercy - care enough about others to be fair and kind."

I asked him in that Baltimore hotel if he had followed those precepts in closing down New York Newsday. "Absolutely," he said affably.

Maybe Willes does represent the brave new order of newspaper managers. If so, it means that newspapers as quality vehicles for delivering information are on their way to becoming museum pieces.

Let us have no illusions, though. The shiny devices that will replace them may disappoint. Will blow-dried television news or cyberspace provide the same kind of rich, detailed, cheaply accessible reports that we now get from the best papers? Online computer networks may serve the elites, but the poor teen-age kid in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn or Sunnyside in Queens is not going to find his high-school sports scores there or articles about his neighborhood. Such stories affirm his existence and, by appearing in a journal that touches on a universe of subjects, connect him to the larger world.

This is not about pie-in-the-sky idealism versus corporate pragmatism. It has been plainly demonstrated that good newspapers can earn a reasonable profit. They are being marked for extinction solely because they cannot produce the sums brought in by "hot" magazines or Hollywood movies.

On the day New York Newsday was killed, reporters from other papers and from radio and television poured into the newsroom to cover the story. One of them stuck a microphone under Pete Hamill's chin. The columnist just shook his head. "Just once," he said wearily, "I'd love to cover the death of a TV station."

Sydney H. Schanberg was a columnist and associate editor at New York Newsday. As a New York Times correspondent, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia in the early 1970s. His book The Death and Life of Dith Pran was the basis of the film The Killing Fields.