Addicted to Ink
Pete Hamill returns to NY Daily News; Jim Dwyer leaves for NY Times.
By
Kathryn S. Wenner
Lori Robertson
Kathryn S. Wenner, a former AJR associate editor, is a copy editor at the Washington Post.
Lori Robertson (robertson.lori@gmail.com), a former AJR managing editor, is a senior contributing writer for the magazine.
Big-name changes at New York's Daily News : Best-selling author and former Daily News columnist and editor in chief Pete Hamill returns, this time as columnist and correspondent; columnist Jim Dwyer jumps to a reporting slot at the New York Times ; and the editorial page gets a nonjournalist editor. Hamill, 65, who has spent the last year in Cuernavaca, Mexico, writing a novel, returns to his TriBeCa loft this month to begin writing a weekly 1,200-word column on just about whatever he wants. His immediate boss and "oldest friend in the business," Editor in Chief Edward Kosner , lured Hamill back to the paper whose editorship he left in 1997 after clashing with owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman . On returning to Zuckerman's domain, Hamill says, "you can't pick and choose as easily as some people might think you can if you want to do this work.... For me, newspapers are like heroin." Dwyer, 44, is departing the Daily News after five-and-a-half years for "a mix of personal and professional reasons," he says. Dwyer says writing a column was like being "on a perpetual motion machine for 15 years.... The leisurely life of the columnist--it's turned out to be a fake." Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, is the naming of former New York mayoral aide Richard Schwartz as the Daily News' editorial page editor. Schwartz spent 1994 through 1997 as senior adviser to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and later founded a company that provides job training and placement to welfare recipients.
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