Donald Forst

Donald H. Forst (July 3, 1932 – January 4, 2014) 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.

Early life and education Forst was born in Crown Heights and raised in Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer. 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. He earned a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. 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.

Career 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. 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.

He joined Newsday in 1971 as national editor and became managing editor, overseeing the investigative series on heroin trafficking that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting in 1974. while he himself said that he took the job "ecause it was insane. It's what Karl Wallenda said: 'Life is on the wire. All the rest is waiting.' "

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."

Retirement and personal life After retiring from The Village Voice in 2005, Forst taught journalism at the University at Albany from 2007 until late in 2013. For 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 New York Post, and secondly to the photographer and writer Starr Ockenga. At the time of his death his companion was Val Haynes.