Newfield, Jack

Investigative journalist, Jack Newfield (1938-2004), made a career out of exposing abuses of power in his native New York City.

The next year, Newfield joined the Village Voice and worked there as a columnist, reporter, and editor for twenty-four years. While at the Voice, he helped define the idea of the alternative press through his investigative articles and unwavering defense of New York's dispossessed. Newfield then joined the New York Daily News as an editor and writer for a new investigative reporting unit. Three years later, he quit after making a principled choice to support the striking newspaper pressmen and refusing to cross their picket line. He quickly joined the New York Post as a columnist. During this time, however, the New York Post almost closed, and a group of writers, which included Newfield, took over production of the paper until Rupert Murdoch reacquired it in 1993. Newfield left the New York Post in 2001 after ten years when a new editor, wanting to take the paper in a different direction, fired him. Subsequently, Newfield wrote columns and investigative articles for the New York Sun, the New York Observer, and The Nation. In 1980, the Center for Investigative Reporting awarded Newfield the George Polk Award for Political Reporting. He also received the 25-Year News Achievement Award from the Society of Silurians in 2000 and a New York State Bar Association Special Award in 1986 for his series of articles on Bobby McLaughlin.