Donald H. Forst was an American newspaper editor who worked for a variety of newspapers, mostly in New York, and headed New York Newsday, The Village Voice, and The Boston Herald.
Background
Forst was born in Crown Heights and raised in Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer 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.
Education
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.
Career
He earned a Master"s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Forst worked at fourteen periodicals in total,including the Houston Press, the Newark Star-Ledger, The Burlington Free Press, and Boston magazine. He was assistant city editor and financial editor of the New York Post and was editor-in-chief of the Boston Herald when the paper almost folded and was saved by being purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1982.
He was credited there with "turning a sleepy broadsheet into lively tabloid".
After working at The New York Herald Tribune until it was merged into The New York World Journal Tribune in 1966, he was cultural editor of The New York Times for a number of years. After its closure in July 1995—reportedly the day after Forst met the Chief Executive Officer of Times-Mirror, Newsday"s parent company, for the first time—he worked for a brief time for the Queens edition of Newsday, then in February 1996 became chief metropolitan editor at the New York Daily News.
He left that position by midsummer, and that fall unexpectedly became editor-in-chief at the The Village Voice. 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", while he himself said that he took the job "ecause it was insane.
lieutenant"s what Karl Wallenda said: "Life is on the wire.
Tony Marro, editor of Newsday from 1986 to 2002, remembered him as so competitive a newspaperman, he "wanted not only to beat the competition but to burn their houses, drive off their cattle and poison their wells" but also said that he "made working in newsrooms a lot of fun."
After retiring from The Village Voice in 2005, Forst taught journalism at the University at Albany from 2007 until late in 2013. Foreign the first year and a half he also continued to lay out a front page for himself every morning. He died in Albany from complications of colon cancer.
Forst was married twice, from 1961 until the mid-1970s to the food writer Gael Greene, whom he met at the The New York Post, and secondly to the photographer and writer Starr Ockenga.
Views
Quotations:
"wanted not only to beat the competition but to burn their houses, drive off their cattle and poison their wells".