He was educated at the University of Vermont, where he started in journalism working on the college newspaper—he said in an interview because there was an attractive girl at the sign-up table.
[2] According to Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice, he had originally wanted to play professional baseball, only his mother sent away the scouts the New York Yankees sent to the house and forbade them to contact her son again.
[1][2] In 1977 he was hired to head the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, but he returned to New York in 1985 to head the newly created New York Newsday, which won two Pulitzers during his tenure, for spot news coverage of the 1991 Union Square derailment[2] and for Jim Dwyer's commentary.
At the time, the New York Times called him "the oddest choice", characterizing him as "the former bad-boy editor of New York Newsday who led that paper to two Pulitzer Prizes but also reveled in front-page cheesecake photos of Marla Maples and Donna Rice",[9] while he himself said that he took the job "[b]ecause it was insane.
"[2][5][9] Although during his tenure there was controversy among other things over admitted insensitivity in a 1999 cover story about a trans man, during it The Village Voice won many awards, including in 2000 a Pulitzer for international reporting for Mark Schoofs' series on AIDS in Africa.