Editor Hamill relishes turn at the top in NY

"I THINK if you had to choose between running a tabloid and being President of the United States, of course you'd run the tabloid, especially in New York", Pete Hamill said last night, and he was only half joking. But then the boy from Brooklyn had printer's ink in his blood from an early age and, besides, being president would mean living away from "the city".

On Monday, Hamill (61) takes over as editor of the Daily News.

His father, Billy Hamill from Belfast, bought a copy of the News on his first day in New York in 1923, and every day after that. His mother, Anne, was one of the Devlins from Madrid Street in the Short Strand. The Wall Street crash began on the day she got off the boat from Ireland in 1929.

She it was who told her son about the "cruel English" and how they stole Ireland with swords and treachery. He learnt from her all about bigotry, and how there was nothing lower than a bigot, except maybe a police informer. In New York, where every race and creed jostled beside one another, it was a valuable lesson.

Pete Ham ill came to love newspapers early by way of their comic sections. His favourite was Terry and the Pirates, which he read in the ever present Daily News. His first job, aged 11, was delivering the Brooklyn Eagle.

Hamill joined the US Navy, studied under the GI Bill in Mexico and wrote for newspapers whenever he had the chance. He joined the New York Post, deadly rival of the News, in 1960.

Soon afterwards, he began a long affair with Shirley MacLaine. In one celebrated incident she became the first woman to be served at the bar of Farrell's, Hamill's local pub in Brooklyn.

For a brief period in 1993 Hamill was editor of the New York Post, but he quit when Rupert Murdoch took over the paper.

Now he's back in charge of a tabloid and happier than ever. The Daily News is in good shape as a business, so he won't be forced to sit on the edge of a precipice. A complete redesign of the paper is planned and colour printing is to be introduced.

"In addition, the city itself is in a very good moment right now. Whether it will last, I have no idea, who the hell knows? But, with crime cut virtually in half, the murder rate at the lowest in 30 years, you can run a newspaper without feeling like you're cataloguing atrocities", Ham ill said last night. "It's like the way Ireland was the summer before last, the amazing summer of the ceasefire and the heatwave. You say `Jeez! Look at the possibilities here'".

What delights him more than anything is that New York is now in the midst of its biggest immigration wave for 100 years, mostly involving people from Latin America and Asia. "New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church. If you don't like this, you can have some of that. You go to Queens - it's just amazing out there, it's the League of Nations, it's the greatest."

But this also makes his new job harder: "You have to edit the paper for the city that is, not the city that was. You can't edit yesterday's paper. But I think, in addition to that, you need to have a sense of memory. You have to understand the cycles of rise and fall, of boom and bust, of despair and optimism."

This is what has made the Daily News famous. Founded in 1919, it was immediately adopted by millions of immigrants like Hamill's father. It covered cops, mobsters, corruption, film stars its photographers captured the Hindenburg explosion and sneaked into an execution.

Its banner headlines captured the spirit of the city. As New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975, and President Gerald Ford refused to help, the Daily News ran the headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead".

The new editor hopes to improve the Daily News's coverage of Ireland and to focus the spotlight on other countries which have contributed to New York's vast cultural cocktail.

"But how we can do that without turning it into palace reporting which is generally what happens in a lot of foreign coverage, is l think the trick", Hamill says. "You will never have enough space in a tabloid paper to compete with the New York Times on foreign coverage. So we have to think how can we do this in the most elegant, the clearest, the most lucid way. So I have some ideas about that and I'm going to see if we can put them into practice.