Newfield, Jack

(b. 18 February 1938 in New York City; d. 20 December 2004 in New York City), liberal journalist and author best known as an advocate for New York City’s working classes.

Newfield was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, by his widowed mother, Ethel (Tuchman) Newfield. His father, Phillip Newfield, died of a heart attack when Newfield was four years old. An only child, Newfield was raised as a latchkey kid in a predominantly black neighborhood in “the working-class Brooklyn of the Dodgers, Democrats, unions, optimism and pluralism.” The ethos of his upbringing infused Newfield’s work, leading him to establish a new genre of journalism, which he called “advocacy journalism.”

Newfield attended Boys High School. He graduated in 1955 and gained admission to New York City’s public, tuition-free Hunter College (later of the City University of New York), from which he graduated with a BA in 1961. While at Hunter, he wrote for the student newspaper, studied journalism, and began to be politically active. He wrote pamphlets for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and came to know Robert Parris Moses, a leader in the southern civil rights movement and New Left of the 1960s. He traveled to Mississippi several times in the early 1960s; at one point in 1963, he spent two days in jail with Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.

During this period Newfield began working as a journalist, writing press releases for Madison Square Garden and articles for Commonweal. His first job with a newspaper was at the New York Daily Mirror as a copyboy. He was fired from the Mirror when, as a personal protest, he destroyed the Associated Press (AP) wire copy announcing the U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. As a result, the Mirror was the only paper in New York City that did not have the invasion as a front-page story. He then worked briefly for Women’s Wear Daily, covering the fur market. Following this, he went to work as the editor of the West Side News. After being fired, he worked for a summer at the New York Post as a reporter and night rewrite man. He was let go because of internal politics, and in 1964 he was hired by Dan Wolf, a founder and editor of the Village Voice. Newfield worked at the Voice for the next twenty-four years as a reporter, columnist, and senior editor. In 1965 he published A Prophetic Minority, a book about his experiences with the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1968 the shock of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, combined with the decline of the civil rights movement, expansion of the Vietnam War, and election of the Republican Richard M. Nixon as president, convinced Newfield to change his journalistic focus. His “feeling of powerlessness about affecting national policy” facilitated his transition from a feature writer on national issues to an investigative journalist focused on New York City.

Influenced by the muckrakers I. F. Stone, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens, Newfield made municipal issues his focal point. His first crusade was raising awareness and reform of lead poisoning of children living in New York City slums. With this issue, Newfield defined his personal form of muckraking, going beyond the series of articles he wrote on the topic for the Village Voice to writing op-ed articles for the New York Times, appearing on television and radio shows, advocating on the issue to other journalists, and contacting aides in the mayor’s office. Newfield’s efforts resulted in a multimillion-dollar allocation from the city government to address the issue and the identification and treatment of three thousand poor children who suffered from lead poisoning.

In his 2002 memoir, Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist, Newfield explained his unique “Joe Frazier method” of advocacy journalism, named after the boxing legend of the 1960s and 1970s. “Keep coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving your hands. Break the other guy’s will.” Newfield’s passionate advocacy often put his objectivity into question. He addressed such issues as political corruption in city government, the criminal justice system, public housing, and government-run nursing homes, as well as investigating boxing promoters, city officials, and building developers. His passion also left him vulnerable to accusations of political favoritism. Newfield responded in his memoir, “I have no liberal guilt because I had no advantages.” His lists of “Ten Worst Judges” and “Ten Worst Landlords” were infamous and were offset by his “Thanksgiving Honor Roll of Heroes,” which the Village Voice published annually for twenty years.

Newfield authored or coauthored fifteen books, including a 1969 biography of Robert F. Kennedy, with whom he became close during Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He also wrote, produced, and consulted on a number of documentaries. He was awarded the George Polk Award in 1980 for writing a series of Village Voice articles on city government. He received an Emmy Award in 1992 for his documentary on the boxing promoter Don King, which he cowrote and produced with Charles Stuart. Newfield’s love of baseball (he was a lifelong fan of Jackie Robinson, who integrated Major League Baseball when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947) inspired Dan Klores’s documentary Viva Baseball! How Latinos Shaped America’s Pastime (2005), which was dedicated to Newfield.

Newfield left the Village Voice in 1988 because of conflicts over the paper’s administration. He joined the New York Daily News as a columnist and senior investigative editor. He resigned in 1990 in support of striking union workers at the Daily News. He then went to work as a columnist at the New York Post in 1991. He wrote for the Post until 2001, when the newspaper was purchased by the conservative businessman Rupert Murdoch and Newfield was dismissed. From 2001 until his death in 2004 from kidney cancer, Newfield contributed columns and exposés to the New York Sun and the Nation. He was a fellow of the Nation Institute.

Newfield married native New Yorker Janie Eisenberg in April 1971. They had two children. Newfield was inducted into the Hunter College Alumni Hall of Fame in 1972. Before learning he was terminally ill, Newfield planned to begin teaching journalism at Hunter College. After his death the Jack Newfield Visiting Professorship in Journalism position was established. Newfield is buried in Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York.

The most complete source on Newfield’s life is his autobiography, Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist (2002). Obituaries are in the New York Times (22 Dec. 2004) and the Nation (10 Jan. 2005).

Annmarie Singh