Alicia Patterson (born October 15, 1906 in Chicago, Illinois - July 2, 1963 in New York) was an American journalist who was co-founder and longtime publisher and editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper Newsday.

She was born into a wealthy, influential family, endowed with riches. She attended the best private schools in America and Europe, but she managed to get herself kicked out of two of them. She made her society debut at an expensive coming-out party in a Chicago hotel. But a few months later, making another debut—as a reporter for her father’s newspaper, the New York Daily News, she fouled up one of her first stories so badly that her own father fired her. Returning home ignominiously to Chicago, a sad failure before the age of 21, she soon married a department store executive’s son and dashed off for a long honeymoon in the horse country of England. That marriage, which began disintegrating in a series of arguments on the honeymoon, lasted only a year. She traveled the world, became a record-setting pilot and an experienced hunter and married a man who shared her interests in flying, hunting and fishing. Her second husband, Joseph W. Brooks, a fishing buddy of her father, was 15 years older than she was. At first, they were quite happy, living in a house that her father had rented her for $1 a year in Sands Point. In less than a decade, she had decided that her second marriage was simply too frivolous.

Patterson was of Chicago's journalistic dynasty. She was the daughter of Joseph Medill Patterson and the great-granddaughter of Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, Eleanor Medill Patterson was her aunt.

In her youth, she watched her father increase in stature, first as one of the leaders of the family business, the Chicago Tribune, then as founder of America’s first successful tabloid, the New York Daily News, which opened in 1919 and reached a circulation of 1,000,000 by the end of 1925. During those years, even as she struggled with the unruly instincts that made school a difficult adventure, she began aspiring to follow her father into journalism.

The other crucial element in her conversion from playgirl to woman of substance was her third marriage, to one of her Sands Point neighbors, Harry Frank Guggenheim. Guggenheim was 16 years older than Patterson, but that was not the most important difference between them. For one thing, there was the matter of life experience. At the time they met, she had done little of substance beyond writing a few articles for Liberty, a magazine that her father had established, and setting a few women’s flying records.

When they married in 1939, one of Guggenheim’s primary concerns was to keep his new wife busy and out of trouble. She believed that her father would someday leave her in a position of power at the News. Guggenheim felt that she should prepare for that opportunity by running a small newspaper of her own. To find the right newspaper, they sought the help of her father’s friend, Max Annenberg, the circulation director at the News. While they were on their honeymoon in the summer of 1939, at Goddard’s rocket-testing site in New Mexico, Annenberg telegraphed them that he had found a good opportunity: the Nassau Daily Journal, a small paper located in a former auto dealership in Hempstead. It had opened on March 1, 1939 and closed on March 10. The paper’s equipment was still sitting in the building, unused.

The result was the establishment of Newsday on September 3, 1940. Not long after that, Guggenheim returned to active duty in the Navy and was assigned to command a naval air station near Trenton. That left her running the paper solo in its early, formative years.

One of the key investigative reporters was a young reporter named Robert W. Greene. Greene was hired from the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, where he was an investigator. At Newsday, Greene turned his skills to the DeKoning investigation. In the years that followed, Greene pioneered a new level of investigative reporting. Before Greene, most investigative reporting relied on friendly sources inside government agencies to drop copies of investigative reports into the laps of reporters. Greene pioneered and developed journalistic techniques that allowed the newspaper to construct its own investigative reports, by aggressive and intelligent use of raw documents.

In later years, investigative projects led by Greene focused on such targets as widespread land corruption in Suffolk County. Of all Newsday investigations, perhaps none had greater impact than a two-year probe of the LILCO Shoreham nuclear plant. The reporter was a Greene disciple names Stuart Diamond. His 1981 series fundamentally changed the political atmosphere and ultimately led to the decommissioning of the plant before it had even opened.

Though she grew up in Chicago, Patterson was a strong partisan of the community that her newspaper served. To protect her child, Newsday, she stayed in a marriage that had gone sour. Over the years, that dedication to Newsday had an impact on her adopted community that went beyond merely a road not built on Fire Island and an airport not operating in the center of Nassau County. She was an early advocate of women’s equality, filling her newsroom with female reporters from the start. She was a voice of sanity standing up to the abuses of the McCarthy era. She nurtured an aggressive style at the newspaper. She created an institution that has lasted more than a half century and significantly shaped her chosen community.

During her lifetime she and Guggenheim agreed that Newsday should remain a Long Island paper and not venture into New York City. But after her death — and after Guggenheim sold the paper to the Times Mirror Company, Newsday started a New York City paper, which put it in direct competition with the paper that her father founded, the Daily News. She had always wanted to show her father that she could be a good journalist. The irony is that long after both Pattersons were dead, Newsday and the New York Daily News were competing in the same high-stakes game.

See also

Alicia Patterson Foundation