Joe Lelyveld presided over The New York Times in the twilight of its dominance as a print newspaper.
Lelyveld, who died Jan. 5 at his Manhattan home from complications of Parkinson's disease, was the last great executive editor of the Times at the dawn of the Internet age.
In an appreciation of Lelyveld written for The Atlantic, Times reporter and newspaper historian Adam Nagourney looks back at Lelyveld's battle to uphold the Times' rigorous journalistic standards as the newspaper entered the digital era and its fast-moving, more sensationalistic news ethos.
Nagourney, who examined the newspaper's shift from print to multimedia journalism in "The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism," in his Atlantic essay calls Lelyveld "a steward and a symbol of a passing era."
While Lelyveld reluctantly accepted the newspaper's first online venture, he distrusted the new medium. "I never really believed that the digital New York Times could have the same authority and sway that the paper New York Times had," he told Nagourney in an interview.
In a 41-year career at The Times, Lelyveld first made his reputation as a foreign correspondent, winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for his 1989 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White," based on his reporting from Johannesburg in the 1960s and 1980s.
After serving as foreign editor and managing editor, Lelyveld held the executive editor's post from 1994-2001, retiring a week before the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. He returned as interim executive editor in 2003 after his successor, Howell Raines, was forced to resign because of the Jayson Blair scandal.
Bill Keller, Lelyveld's successor as executive editor after Raines' downfall, wrote an appreciation of Lelyveld for the Times. In the eulogy, Keller recalled that Lelyveld's book on South Africa inspired him to follow in his footsteps as an award-winning foreign correspondent.
Nagourney sadly notes that Lelyveld's beloved print newspaper with its diminished circulation and advertising now plays a minimal role at the Times, where digital subscriptions dominate.
Yet, "The enduring quality of The Times' journalism today - whatever platform it appears on - is testimony to the seriousness of purpose that is ingrained in the newsroom and that Lelyveld championed," he says, cautioning that those values remain imperiled in the digital age.
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