Newsday, evening daily tabloid newspaper published in Long Island, N.Y., to serve residents of suburban Nassau and Suffolk counties, east of New York City.
It was established in 1940, as residential suburbs began to expand. Its founders were Harry Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson, daughter of publisher Joseph Medill Patterson. They set a liberal-independent policy for Newsday, which specialized in reporting serious local news, sometimes using teams of investigative reporters. The paper moved into new plants several times between 1947 and 1979, when it settled in Melville, Long Island, and began making the shift to computerized typesetting and other technological innovations.
In 1953 Newsday won a Pulitzer Prize for “disinterested and meritorious public service” and earned two more Pulitzer awards in later years. It was sold to the Times Mirror Company group, which also published the Los Angeles Times, in 1971 and became part of the Tribune Company in 2000. In 2008 the Tribune Company agreed to sell Newsday to Cablevision Systems Corporation.