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Peter Nessen, a friend, said Mr. Forst had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer.

Mr. Forst projected an old-fashioned newspaperman's toughness and a colorful, devil-may-care demeanor. According to a profile of Mr. Forst in the 1990s, he ventured into journalism when he joined his college newspaper; he did so because he noticed an attractive girl at the sign-up table.

He went on to a long and peripatetic career that included stops at newspapers that fought and lost circulation wars, like The New York Herald Tribune and The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and survivors like The New York Times, where he oversaw cultural-news coverage for several years after The Herald Tribune merged with two other papers, creating the short-lived The New York World Journal Tribune.

Mr. Forst worked for Newsday twice. He was hired in 1971 as managing editor and, according to Robert F. Keeler's book "Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid," played a role in preparing some of the articles for a series on heroin trafficking that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1976. The series followed the drug from Turkish poppy fields through France to the streets of Long Island and, as the book version of the series put it, on to "its ultimate customer — the young American addict."

Mr. Keeler wrote that Mr. Forst huddled with the team working on the series for two weeks at a villa on the French Riviera after the reporters arrived from Turkey.

"I've got to admit, it wasn't the toughest duty in the world," Mr. Forst said. The team resumed its reporting after Mr. Forst returned to Long Island.

Mr. Forst quit Newsday for The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1977, hired by the top editor in Los Angeles, James G. Bellows, who had been his boss at The Herald Tribune. But Mr. Forst returned in 1985 as the founding editor of New York Newsday, an edition that carried the Long Island paper into the five boroughs. He gave New York Newsday its own identity, separate from its Long Island parent, and assembled a staff that covered the city aggressively.

Mr. Forst positioned New York Newsday between the city's two established tabloids — The New York Post and The Daily News — and The Times. He hired stars like Jimmy Breslin and Dennis Hamill and young journalists and editors he pushed to report deeper and harder.

The paper won two Pulitzer Prizes. But the Times Mirror Company, which owned Newsday, shut down New York Newsday in July 1995. Other New York Newsday editors said that Mr. Forst had not met Mark H. Willes, a former consumer-products executive who was the chief executive of Times Mirror, until the day before the shutdown of Mr. Forst's paper was announced. Mr. Willes said later that the company had concluded that there was not room in New York City for three tabloids.

Mr. Forst worked as the editor of Newsday's streamlined Queens edition before resigning to begin a short-lived tenure as metropolitan editor of The Daily News in February 1996. By midsummer, he had left The News, and by that fall, he became the top editor at The Village Voice, the leftist weekly that was famous for its alternative worldview and its cantankerous, all but uneditable writers.

Mr. Forst seemed an odd choice. He said that until he sought the job, he had not read The Voice in years.

"Why did I take this?" he was quoted as saying at the time. "Because it was insane. It's what Karl Wallenda said: 'Life is on the wire. All the rest is waiting.'"

Mr. Forst presided over The Voice until 2005. For the last seven years, he had taught journalism at the University at Albany.

His survivors include his second wife, Starr Ockenga, a photographer. He was married to the food writer Gael Greene from 1961 until the mid-1970s. Ms. Greene said on Saturday that they had met when they worked at The New York Post, she during the day, he at night. She said he got a promotion because he happened to be reading The Wall Street Journal one day. The top editors named him financial editor, she said.

Donald Forst was born on July 3, 1932, and grew up in the Jewish middle class of 1930s Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer. He attended the University of Vermont and earned a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

His companion, Val Haynes, said Mr. Forst missed newspapering even after he took to teaching prospective journalists. "When he left The Voice," she said in an interview on Saturday, "for the first year and a half, every morning he woke up and designed the front page of a broadsheet. Every single morning. Newspapers were his life."