Showing posts with label Reporters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reporters. Show all posts
Monday, October 4, 2010
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Robin Toner, Times Reporter
Robin Toner, who was the first woman to be the national political correspondent of The New York Times and who had a significant hand in the coverage of five presidential elections, innumerable Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and the great legislative debates of the day, died early Friday at her home in Washington. She was 54. The cause was complications of colon cancer, her family said.
In a career of nearly 25 years at The Times, and in an age of increasing specialization, Ms. Toner reported authoritatively on almost every domestic issue, whether it was taxes, welfare, Social Security, immigration or health-care policy.
And in a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take. As a result: only half a dozen published corrections over the years, on more than 1,900 articles with her byline.
In 1992, Ms. Toner was The Times’s lead reporter on the election of Bill Clinton, a rollicking campaign in which her tough-minded coverage helped set the pace for other reporters. A few years later, after marriage and motherhood made long months on the campaign trail less practical for her, she became chief of correspondents on the paper’s national desk in New York, coaching reporters in bureaus around the country in their coverage of state legislatures, budget deficits (or surpluses) and assorted scandals, crises and crimes.
She later returned to the Washington bureau, where she held the title of senior writer, and covered a wide range of issues, including abortion rights, racial justice and judicial nominations, with a special feel for Southern politics.
“When you watched her work — relentless on the phone, gnawing her fingernails to the nub, a perfectionist on the keyboard — you’d think: a workhorse, not a showhorse,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. “Then you’d read the result and it would be elegant. She was one of the best.”
Dan Balz, her frequent competitor at The Washington Post, said her articles were “grounded in her knowledge of what makes a good campaign, but not tethered to the language or minutiae of politics.”
And Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said in a statement: “Robin was a reporter’s reporter who deeply cared about the people and the issues she covered. There was rarely a day during our health care debates that I didn’t open the paper to read Robin’s story and learn how what we were doing impacted people.”
Roberta Denise Toner grew up in Chadds Ford, Pa., outside Philadelphia, one of six children. Her father, Charles R. Toner, was an oil refinery supervisor and World War II B-17 pilot; her mother, the former Mary Louise Zern, was a homemaker who had worked as a “Rosie the Riveter” in a wartime aircraft plant. A summa cum laude graduate of Syracuse University, Ms. Toner began her reporting career in West Virginia at The Charleston Daily Mail and later worked for The Atlanta Journal and Constitution before joining The Times in 1985.
She had empathy for underdogs, a soft spot for politicians who did the hard work and a keen appreciation of the role of caste and class in American politics. In a 2004 article, noting that all four nominees on both major party presidential tickets were rich, white men, she described John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina, as “Atticus Finch with an attitude.”
In 1994, she summed up former Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, whom she had covered for years, as “an extremely worldly man, whose career may have begun in the Congregational Church but who proceeded to inspire, enrage, annoy, uplift, disappoint, bewilder (but never bore) fans and critics on a much broader stage.”
While Ms. Toner loved the game of politics, she never lost sight of the practical problems that politicians often fail to resolve. “Reality often seemed to be just another subject for debate in the health care struggle,” she wrote after the collapse of the Clinton administration’s proposed restructuring in 1994. “But it has a way of reasserting itself when the shouting is over. As Congress and the White House move on to lobbying reform and trade issues, a variety of experts are quietly noting that the problems that prompted the health care struggle are still, ahem, very much here.”
It was in covering the health care debate that year that Ms. Toner met her husband, Peter Gosselin, then a reporter for The Boston Globe and now chief economic correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.”
Mr. Gosselin survives her, as do their 11-year-old twins, Jacob and Nora. Ms. Toner is also survived by two brothers, Chuck, of Moorestown, N.J., and Mark, of Kensington, Md.; and three sisters, Gretchen Toner and Jane McConnell, both of Wilmington, Del., and Pat Lefever of West Chester, Pa.
When her longtime New York Times colleague David Rosenbaum was murdered as he walked near his Washington home in 2006, Ms. Toner described his approach to reporting in words that applied equally to hers: “He believed that, behind every arcane tax provision or line in an appropriations bill, there were real people getting something, or getting something taken away. He believed that there was, on most stories, something approximating truth out there if you were smart enough and hungry enough to find it.”
December 13, 2008
Robin Toner, Times Reporter, Is Dead at 54
By TODD S. PURDUM
In a career of nearly 25 years at The Times, and in an age of increasing specialization, Ms. Toner reported authoritatively on almost every domestic issue, whether it was taxes, welfare, Social Security, immigration or health-care policy.
Jamie Rose for The New York Times
Robin Toner at the U.S. Capitol in Washington in December 2006.
And in a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take. As a result: only half a dozen published corrections over the years, on more than 1,900 articles with her byline.
In 1992, Ms. Toner was The Times’s lead reporter on the election of Bill Clinton, a rollicking campaign in which her tough-minded coverage helped set the pace for other reporters. A few years later, after marriage and motherhood made long months on the campaign trail less practical for her, she became chief of correspondents on the paper’s national desk in New York, coaching reporters in bureaus around the country in their coverage of state legislatures, budget deficits (or surpluses) and assorted scandals, crises and crimes.
She later returned to the Washington bureau, where she held the title of senior writer, and covered a wide range of issues, including abortion rights, racial justice and judicial nominations, with a special feel for Southern politics.
“When you watched her work — relentless on the phone, gnawing her fingernails to the nub, a perfectionist on the keyboard — you’d think: a workhorse, not a showhorse,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. “Then you’d read the result and it would be elegant. She was one of the best.”
Dan Balz, her frequent competitor at The Washington Post, said her articles were “grounded in her knowledge of what makes a good campaign, but not tethered to the language or minutiae of politics.”
And Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said in a statement: “Robin was a reporter’s reporter who deeply cared about the people and the issues she covered. There was rarely a day during our health care debates that I didn’t open the paper to read Robin’s story and learn how what we were doing impacted people.”
Roberta Denise Toner grew up in Chadds Ford, Pa., outside Philadelphia, one of six children. Her father, Charles R. Toner, was an oil refinery supervisor and World War II B-17 pilot; her mother, the former Mary Louise Zern, was a homemaker who had worked as a “Rosie the Riveter” in a wartime aircraft plant. A summa cum laude graduate of Syracuse University, Ms. Toner began her reporting career in West Virginia at The Charleston Daily Mail and later worked for The Atlanta Journal and Constitution before joining The Times in 1985.
She had empathy for underdogs, a soft spot for politicians who did the hard work and a keen appreciation of the role of caste and class in American politics. In a 2004 article, noting that all four nominees on both major party presidential tickets were rich, white men, she described John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina, as “Atticus Finch with an attitude.”
In 1994, she summed up former Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, whom she had covered for years, as “an extremely worldly man, whose career may have begun in the Congregational Church but who proceeded to inspire, enrage, annoy, uplift, disappoint, bewilder (but never bore) fans and critics on a much broader stage.”
While Ms. Toner loved the game of politics, she never lost sight of the practical problems that politicians often fail to resolve. “Reality often seemed to be just another subject for debate in the health care struggle,” she wrote after the collapse of the Clinton administration’s proposed restructuring in 1994. “But it has a way of reasserting itself when the shouting is over. As Congress and the White House move on to lobbying reform and trade issues, a variety of experts are quietly noting that the problems that prompted the health care struggle are still, ahem, very much here.”
It was in covering the health care debate that year that Ms. Toner met her husband, Peter Gosselin, then a reporter for The Boston Globe and now chief economic correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.”
Mr. Gosselin survives her, as do their 11-year-old twins, Jacob and Nora. Ms. Toner is also survived by two brothers, Chuck, of Moorestown, N.J., and Mark, of Kensington, Md.; and three sisters, Gretchen Toner and Jane McConnell, both of Wilmington, Del., and Pat Lefever of West Chester, Pa.
When her longtime New York Times colleague David Rosenbaum was murdered as he walked near his Washington home in 2006, Ms. Toner described his approach to reporting in words that applied equally to hers: “He believed that, behind every arcane tax provision or line in an appropriations bill, there were real people getting something, or getting something taken away. He believed that there was, on most stories, something approximating truth out there if you were smart enough and hungry enough to find it.”
December 13, 2008
Robin Toner, Times Reporter, Is Dead at 54
By TODD S. PURDUM
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Proud Muckraker
Having a discussion, his name came up; I remebered his journalism. I searched for him,. and found the obit.
Jack Newfield, 66, Proud Muckraker, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 22, 2004
Jack Newfield, a journalist and author who brought Brooklyn moxie, sassy cynicism and often zealous partisanship to muckraking reporting on subjects from New York politics to boxing, died on Monday night at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 66. The cause was kidney cancer that spread to his lungs, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the family.
Mainly as a writer for The Village Voice for 24 years but also for many other ublications, including The New York Daily News and The New York Post, Mr. Newfield carved out a reputation as a fierce champion of underdogs. He successfully pushed for a law outlawing lead paint, helped win an innocent man's release from prison, and contributed to the enactment of tougher campaign financing laws.
For many people, he came to embody The Voice during a golden period, the mid-1960's to the early 1970's, when it solidified its position as the exemplar of the alternative press, championing subjectivity and personal journalism.
For example, he was a leader in the movement to depose President Lyndon B. Johnson while he wrote political commentary in The Voice, which he gratefully noted made "no pretense of objectivity."
His fame grew as he periodically wrote articles about the city's "10 worst judges" and "10 worst landlords" for The Voice and other publications.
His books dug deeper still, as he and his co-authors uncovered the deals made with clubhouse barons while other journalists focused on the mayor. "The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York" (Viking, 1977), written with Paul Du Brul, is considered a classic in urban muckraking. A revised edition of the book, "The Permanent Government: Who Really Rules New York?" was published by Pilgrim in 1981.
Just as influential was "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York" (Harper, 1988), written with Wayne Barrett.
But Mr. Newfield's methods attracted criticism from those who felt that he put crusading zeal ahead of the journalistic precept of impartiality, treating sources who cooperated with him better than those who did not. Some remarked on his deep participation in political issues, campaigns and movements that he also wrote about.
"There is no middle way to approach Jack Newfield," Martin F. Nolan, then chief of the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1971. "A reader either blisters, grits his teeth and curses, or he nods, murmurs 'right on' and again curses, but not at Jack Newfield."
As he grew powerful among liberals, Mr. Newfield sometimes appeared to wield his power like the kingmakers he excoriated in print. His words were weapons to promote friends like Governor Cuomo and castigate enemies like Mayor Edward I. Koch. For many years, people running or thinking of running for state or city office dined with him in the hope of passing his inspection.
Mr. Newfield himself suggested that facts should be subservient to larger understandings. "The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth," he wrote in his autobiography, "Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist" (St. Martin's, 2002).
His own life reverberated with the vigor and color of his hometown and his generation. He grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a maniacal Dodgers fan, enlisted early on in the civil rights movement, and was an original member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He was so involved in Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidential nomination, he wrote, that he often considered himself part of it.
Mr. Newfield became friends with many prizefighters and often wrote about boxing, but this, too fell neatly into his leftist world view. Boxers, he wrote in his autobiography, are best seen as "exploited workers" and boxing promoters as "robber barons."
Jack Abraham Newfield was born on Feb. 18, 1938, into the Brooklyn of "open fire hydrants, spaldeens, the double-movie theaters, the comic books in candy stores, the egg creams, the stickball games with a broomstick handle," he wrote in his autobiography. He worshiped Jackie Robinson and other Dodgers, feeling "cold betrayal" when the team left for Los Angeles.
His campaign to commemorate the historic moment when Pee Wee Reese embraced Robinson in front of jeering racists with a statue of the scene was finally successful. It will be unveiled next summer at the Brooklyn Cyclones ballpark in Coney Island, Mr. Newfield wrote in a New York Sun column in October.
Mr. Newfield was 4 when his father died, and his mother struggled to raise her only child by working as a saleswoman in a department store. He graduated from Hunter College, which he called both "useless" and "priceless" in a short speech acknowledging his election to that school's alumni hall of fame in 1972.
His first journalism jobs were as a copy boy for The New York Daily Mirror and as editor of the weekly West Side News. In 1964, Dan Wolf, editor of The Voice, hired him as a $100-a-week staff writer. He wrote about anything he wanted, including a valiant defense of Bob Dylan's switch to an electric guitar.
But his thrust was as a crusader, from shedding light on abuse of the elderly and fraud in nursing homes to corrupt union leaders to lead-poisoning. He used what he called the "Joe Frazier method," referring to the daunting straight-ahead style of the heavyweight champion, to force reforms.
"Combine activism with writing," he wrote in a description of the approach. "Create a constituency for reform. And don't stop until you have achieved some progress or positive results."
When he went after bad nursing homes in the 1970's, he lobbied for Charles J. Hynes, then a Brooklyn prosecutor, to be appointed special prosecutor for nursing home abuses. He worked with civil liberties lawyers and others to win the release in 1986 of Bobby McLaughlin, a convicted murderer who new evidence showed was innocent.
During the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, an exasperated Mr. Newfield threw a typewriter from a hotel window at police officers beating demonstrators.
Because he saw himself as a participant in politics, not just a chronicler, he developed close friendships with politicians. Most prominent was former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom his wife worked as a driver in his losing 1977 campaign for mayor against Mr. Koch.
That partisanship sometimes backfired. Mr. Cuomo wrote in his diary that Mr. Koch said he could not support him because of his close relationship with Mr. Newfield.
Mr. Newfield's 10 books include a biography of Don King, the boxing promoter. His Robert F. Kennedy biography, reissued in 2003 on the 35th anniversary of the senator's murder, received excellent reviews both times around.
Mr. Newfield, who worked for The News and The Post after leaving The Voice in 1988, is survived by his wife, Janie Eisenberg; a son, Joey; and a daughter, Rebecca.
Mr. Newfield, who was helping to produce two sports documentary films at the time of his death, wrote many of his later columns about the arts, including a series celebrating "The Sopranos" television show. He explained in his memoirs that, for him, politics had grown "more empty."
"I discovered I liked writing positive columns more than negative ones," he wrote.
Jack Newfield, 66, Proud Muckraker, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 22, 2004
Jack Newfield, a journalist and author who brought Brooklyn moxie, sassy cynicism and often zealous partisanship to muckraking reporting on subjects from New York politics to boxing, died on Monday night at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 66. The cause was kidney cancer that spread to his lungs, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the family.
For many people, he came to embody The Voice during a golden period, the mid-1960's to the early 1970's, when it solidified its position as the exemplar of the alternative press, championing subjectivity and personal journalism.
For example, he was a leader in the movement to depose President Lyndon B. Johnson while he wrote political commentary in The Voice, which he gratefully noted made "no pretense of objectivity."
His fame grew as he periodically wrote articles about the city's "10 worst judges" and "10 worst landlords" for The Voice and other publications.
His books dug deeper still, as he and his co-authors uncovered the deals made with clubhouse barons while other journalists focused on the mayor. "The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York" (Viking, 1977), written with Paul Du Brul, is considered a classic in urban muckraking. A revised edition of the book, "The Permanent Government: Who Really Rules New York?" was published by Pilgrim in 1981.
Just as influential was "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York" (Harper, 1988), written with Wayne Barrett.
But Mr. Newfield's methods attracted criticism from those who felt that he put crusading zeal ahead of the journalistic precept of impartiality, treating sources who cooperated with him better than those who did not. Some remarked on his deep participation in political issues, campaigns and movements that he also wrote about.
"There is no middle way to approach Jack Newfield," Martin F. Nolan, then chief of the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1971. "A reader either blisters, grits his teeth and curses, or he nods, murmurs 'right on' and again curses, but not at Jack Newfield."
As he grew powerful among liberals, Mr. Newfield sometimes appeared to wield his power like the kingmakers he excoriated in print. His words were weapons to promote friends like Governor Cuomo and castigate enemies like Mayor Edward I. Koch. For many years, people running or thinking of running for state or city office dined with him in the hope of passing his inspection.
Mr. Newfield himself suggested that facts should be subservient to larger understandings. "The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth," he wrote in his autobiography, "Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist" (St. Martin's, 2002).
His own life reverberated with the vigor and color of his hometown and his generation. He grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a maniacal Dodgers fan, enlisted early on in the civil rights movement, and was an original member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He was so involved in Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidential nomination, he wrote, that he often considered himself part of it.
Mr. Newfield became friends with many prizefighters and often wrote about boxing, but this, too fell neatly into his leftist world view. Boxers, he wrote in his autobiography, are best seen as "exploited workers" and boxing promoters as "robber barons."
Jack Abraham Newfield was born on Feb. 18, 1938, into the Brooklyn of "open fire hydrants, spaldeens, the double-movie theaters, the comic books in candy stores, the egg creams, the stickball games with a broomstick handle," he wrote in his autobiography. He worshiped Jackie Robinson and other Dodgers, feeling "cold betrayal" when the team left for Los Angeles.
His campaign to commemorate the historic moment when Pee Wee Reese embraced Robinson in front of jeering racists with a statue of the scene was finally successful. It will be unveiled next summer at the Brooklyn Cyclones ballpark in Coney Island, Mr. Newfield wrote in a New York Sun column in October.
Mr. Newfield was 4 when his father died, and his mother struggled to raise her only child by working as a saleswoman in a department store. He graduated from Hunter College, which he called both "useless" and "priceless" in a short speech acknowledging his election to that school's alumni hall of fame in 1972.
His first journalism jobs were as a copy boy for The New York Daily Mirror and as editor of the weekly West Side News. In 1964, Dan Wolf, editor of The Voice, hired him as a $100-a-week staff writer. He wrote about anything he wanted, including a valiant defense of Bob Dylan's switch to an electric guitar.
But his thrust was as a crusader, from shedding light on abuse of the elderly and fraud in nursing homes to corrupt union leaders to lead-poisoning. He used what he called the "Joe Frazier method," referring to the daunting straight-ahead style of the heavyweight champion, to force reforms.
"Combine activism with writing," he wrote in a description of the approach. "Create a constituency for reform. And don't stop until you have achieved some progress or positive results."
When he went after bad nursing homes in the 1970's, he lobbied for Charles J. Hynes, then a Brooklyn prosecutor, to be appointed special prosecutor for nursing home abuses. He worked with civil liberties lawyers and others to win the release in 1986 of Bobby McLaughlin, a convicted murderer who new evidence showed was innocent.
During the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, an exasperated Mr. Newfield threw a typewriter from a hotel window at police officers beating demonstrators.
Because he saw himself as a participant in politics, not just a chronicler, he developed close friendships with politicians. Most prominent was former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom his wife worked as a driver in his losing 1977 campaign for mayor against Mr. Koch.
That partisanship sometimes backfired. Mr. Cuomo wrote in his diary that Mr. Koch said he could not support him because of his close relationship with Mr. Newfield.
Mr. Newfield's 10 books include a biography of Don King, the boxing promoter. His Robert F. Kennedy biography, reissued in 2003 on the 35th anniversary of the senator's murder, received excellent reviews both times around.
Mr. Newfield, who worked for The News and The Post after leaving The Voice in 1988, is survived by his wife, Janie Eisenberg; a son, Joey; and a daughter, Rebecca.
Mr. Newfield, who was helping to produce two sports documentary films at the time of his death, wrote many of his later columns about the arts, including a series celebrating "The Sopranos" television show. He explained in his memoirs that, for him, politics had grown "more empty."
"I discovered I liked writing positive columns more than negative ones," he wrote.
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