The death of Jack Newfield from complications from kidney cancer at age 66 may not reverberate loudly across a conservative-dominated Washington, but he was a huge deal in New York City (which is to say, he was a huge deal), and his impact on American journalism was dramatic and deserves a moment's appreciation.
There have been muckrakers and investigative reporters in this country going back to Jacob Riis at least. But Newfield reinvented, and reinvigorated, the genre. When he started breaking stories for The Village Voicein the 1960s, he introduced a new kind of investigative journalism -- long-form, narrative, essayistic, combining elements of the New Journalism then in vogue at magazines like Esquire with enough new facts to lead to the indictments, convictions, and disgrace of a lot of bad, bad guys.
Newfield's targets were political, but there was almost always a human element that motivated his work. His first huge set of stories, about nursing-home scandals in New York, brought down political figures, but also highlighted inhuman treatment of poor elderly people. Later, a series of stories freed from prison a man falsely convicted of murder.
It was at The Village Voice in the 1960s and '70s that Newfield did his reinventing. The Voice was an amazing cauldron in those days, partly for the way it chronicled the bohemia of Greenwich Village (long before one-bedroom apartments cost $700,000), and partly for its intelligently boosterish coverage of the Village arts scene (back in the days when it fully deserved boosting). The Voice may have been better known for those elements of its personality, but its investigative reporting was trailblazing and fearless. The number of stories the paper broke, beating (in those days) five or six daily newspapers, is astounding.
In addition to tracking down the ne'er-do-wells, the paper invented a new way -- shorn of the conventions of objectivity -- of talking about the good guys. Eventually, they had to coin a name for what the paper did, a name that's still in the journalism textbooks: “advocacy journalism.” And Newfield, by and large, created it. And in doing that, he attracted protégés who became some of the country's greatest liberal investigative journalists. Joe Conason led the way in debunking the Whitewater “scandal”; Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins are still breaking stories at the Voice; and William Bastone went on to create thesmokinggun.com.
Newfield chronicled the rise of Bobby Kennedy, and after Kennedy's assassination (at which he was present), he didn't have many heroes on the national stage. But he always remained an immense force in New York City politics. With Barrett, he wrote the blistering City for Sale, a chronicle of corruption during the years of Ed Koch's mayoralty. Koch became a special foe, accusing Newfield of playing politics with his journalism. And Koch wasn't the only one to make that accusation. What is true is that Newfield had a weakness for heroes, whose less attractive sides he did not always permit himself to see. Newfield kept his world black and white.
But a person who sees heroes also has a sure sense of who's doing wrong in the world, and Newfield's radar rarely missed on that score. His annual (for many years) “Ten Worst Landlords” list in the Voice forced many a city bureaucrat to get to work righting wrongs that had been ignorable (until the list appeared).
I grew up a great admirer of the kind of journalism Newfield and Barrett et al. practiced in the Voice. I had subscribed to the paper since I was about 16, and I'll never forget how excited I was to walk in the door of 842 Broadway my first day on the job realizing that, far from reading this impossibly exotic sheet in my bedroom in Morgantown, West Virginia, I was actually reporting to work there. I was intimidated the first time I met Jack Newfield. So it was odd that, in the years that I was in New York, I ended up having some disagreements with him. One of my last New York magazine columns, in fact, criticized a series he had co-written in The New York Sun trying -- reaching, I thought -- to establish a thread of corruption in Mark Green's mayoral campaign.
But they were disagreements, and I never lost sight of Newfield's larger impact. The kind of journalism he pioneered eventually became familiar, and, in less talented hands, sometimes a cliché. But Jack Newfield invented something, during a historical moment that badly needed the invention. There are many journalists perhaps more famous nationally about whom far less can be said.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
