Alicia Patterson reluctantly became a newspaper publisher in 1940 because her new husband wanted to keep her busy and out of trouble, and because she wanted to show her father that she could be as good a journalist as he was. From that timid start she created the most successful new daily newspaper of the postwar period.

The phenomenal growth of Newsday--from a makeshift plant in a former auto dealership to a position of direct competition with the New York Times in New York City--depended on two major sociological and managerial factors. One was the stunning population growth on Long Island in the years after World War II, when the combination of returning veterans and astute developers created the archetypal American suburb in Nassau and Suffolk counties, east of New York City. The other was an almost incomprehensible lack of vision by the leaders of the established New...