New York newsman Donald Forst dies

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published 11 years ago

NEW YORK:  Donald Forst, a veteran newsman who led New York Newsday and the Village Voice as they won Pulitzer Prizes and also worked at more than a dozen other newspapers, died Saturday at age 81.

He died at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany of complications of colon cancer, Forst's companion, Val Haynes, said.

Forst's journalism career started in the mid-1950s and included stints as cultural editor of The New York Times, assistant city editor of the New York Post and editor in chief of the Boston Herald. He also worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Houston Press and Boston Magazine.

Forst was best known for the decade he spent as editor in chief at New York Newsday, where he nurtured reporters and columnists such as Jim Dwyer and Gail Collins before the paper folded.

Dwyer, who won a Pulitzer for commentary at New York Newsday in 1995, said that he and many others were "mentored, nurtured, prodded, tormented by Don into writing lively, accurate stories."

"He might send somebody to go live in an obscure village in the Dominican Republic for three months," said Dwyer, now a New York Times columnist. "He might send someone else to write about the subways three times a week because that was the defining experience of a New Yorker. He wanted to be first and exclusive with everything so he pushed and pushed and pushed."- AP