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 , 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 . 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.
