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Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 4/21/2005 5:53:40 PM
Title: Vitello quits Newsday to join the New York Times
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
Memo from Newsday editor John Mancini

April 21, 2005

TO: The Staff

FROM: John Mancini
 
It is my sad duty to report that Paul Vitello is leaving Newsday to join the metro staff at the New York Times.

Paul has made an incalculable contribution to Newsday in his 24 years with us, first as an ace reporter and then, most indelibly, as a columnist of rare ability.

His contributions, of course, went far beyond what he gave our readers in print. His generosity of spirit, his willingness to offer counsel to colleagues and his never-wavering dedication to the craft made him a part of all of our lives here at the paper.

Paul will continue to write his column through the middle of next month. He leaves us a legacy of fine, clear-eyed writing and reporting, and the challenge of living up to the traditions he has carried forward so ably.

We wish him the best as he embarks on this new journey. He will be missed.

......

Memo from New York Times metro editor Susan Edgerly

April 21, 2005

Paul Vitello, the Newsday columnist, is coming to The Times to cover Long Island.

For close to 20 years, Paul's column has perfectly distilled Long Island's strange brew: its immense depths of humor and lunacy; the sad and startling gaps between races and paychecks and accents; the rollicking corruption and infuriating patchwork of dubious governments.

And he has been a true reporter among columnists, escaping from the Melville newsroom and using his notebook to give voice to hundreds of
intimate stories amid the island's cacophony. Long Island may lack a center, and it may lack a common purpose beyond hatred of the LIRR, but it has had a singular storyteller, and now he's ours.

This is what Jim Dwyer, who is not unfamiliar with column-writing, says about Paul: "By a country mile, Paul Vitello is the premier observer not just of Long Island, but of suburbanism and how it shapes, and is shaped by, the culture. This approach ­- chronicling the comforts and discontent among the young and old of suburbia ­- makes him a universally appealing writer.

"Had Paul spent the last two decades writing with such energy and grace at a big city paper, his regard as one of the soberest, keenest, most interesting news columnists in print would be shared not just by the readers of Newsday, but much of the newspaper-reading world. When I was travelling the columnist road ­- in a paper where I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Murray Kempton, Gail Collins, Jimmy Breslin ­- I regarded Paul's work as the model for the form, a voice rendered at perfect pitch: well-reported, politically agnostic, understated and vivid."

Before becoming a columnist in 1987, Paul was a reporter at Newsday,
at The Kansas City Times, the Knickerbocker News of Albany and the City News Bureau of Chicago. He grew up in Manhattan on the Lower East Side and graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now LaGuardia). He earned his BA at Trinity College in Hartford. He's married to Carol Polsky, a reporter at Newsday, and they have two children, Sam, 14, and Anna, 12.

He arrives mid-May and says he's delighted to join us. Please make him feel welcome.

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