For the Record

Joseph Lelyveld (1937-2024):

1986 General Nonfiction winner and former New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld died Friday at his home in Manhattan from complications of Parkinson's disease, according to an obituary by 1996 Spot News Reporting winner Robert McFadden. He was 86. "Cerebral and introspective, [...] Lelyveld was for nearly four decades one of the most respected journalists in America, a globe-trotting adventurer who reported from Washington, Congo, India, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and London, winning acclaim for his prolific and perceptive articles," McFadden wrote. "Coming home, he rose up The Times's editorial pyramid to its pinnacle, the executive editorship, arguably the most powerful post in American journalism. In his seven years at the helm, from 1994 to 2001, The Times climbed to record levels of revenue and profits, expanded its national and international readerships, introduced color photographs to the front page, created new sections, and ushered in the digital age with a Times website and round-the-clock news operations." During this period, "his staffs won multiple Pulitzer Prizes for reporting — on racial attitudes and contemporary life in America, federal tax loopholes, the work of the Supreme Court, drug corruption in Mexico, Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan and the sale of technology to China, and for feature and deadline reporting. Seventeen members of his staffs were Pulitzer finalists." Although he "retired a week before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," Lelyveld briefly returned to The Times as interim executive editor in 2003 at the behest of then-Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. amid the Jayson Blair scandal, which led to the resignations of his successor, 1992 Feature Writing winner Howell Raines, and Managing Editor Gerald M. Boyd. "Traumatized by the scandal and exhausted by [...] Raines's demands for greater production, the staff largely welcomed the return of [...] Lelyveld, who professed some reluctance, having embarked on a new career writing books and freelance articles. Six weeks later, [1989 International Reporting winner] Bill Keller, a columnist and former Times correspondent who had been [...] Lelyveld’s managing editor and his choice as a successor, was named the executive editor." In a Friday statement, Sulzberger reflected on Lelyveld's career: "Everyone knows Joe as a giant in journalism, but first and foremost he was a thoughtful, compassionate man who cared deeply about his colleagues. He was not only a great executive editor who steered The Times through some challenging moments at the advent of the internet, but he also returned to help heal the newsroom at a very low point. He will be remembered by many for journalistic triumphs and his humanity. I will always remember him as my dear friend." The Cincinnati-born son of Shakespeare scholar Toby Bookholtz and Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld (a prominent leader in Reform Judaism who also worked as a civil rights organizer), he was raised by relatives in New York City following his parents' separation. After completing his secondary education at the Bronx High School of Science, Lelyveld earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1958 and an M.A. in history from the institution a year later. In 1960, he took his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Thereafter, he "discovered his passion for writing, especially about international affairs," while completing a Fulbright scholarship in India and present-day Myanmar. "I found, through sheer dumb luck, that newspapering suited a deep need I seemed to have to not know what was going to happen next in my life," he said during a later commencement speech at the Columbia Journalism School. "I found that I thrived on surprise, and that there were people who might pay me to cultivate this instinct." Upon returning to the United States, he began working in the gofer-ish role of a copy boy at The Times in early 1962 before transitioning to "crafting news bulletins for the Times-owned WQXR on the sunrise shift." Beginning his career at The Times in earnest as a general assignment reporter in 1963, he completed a required period on the metropolitan desk (coinciding with preparations for the 1964 New York World's Fair), eventually leading to international assignments in Congo, South Africa (where he "[explored] ordeals and absurdities under [its] apartheid system of racial separation," prompting his expulsion "after 11 months" by the government, which was "displeased with his work") and India (as New Delhi bureau chief). In 1972, he "[undertook] intensive Chinese language studies at Cambridge" in preparation for a potential bureau role in the People's Republic of China; however, the Chinese government "did not permit The Times to open a bureau when [...] Lelyveld completed his training, and from 1973 to 1974 he covered China and Southeast Asia from Hong Kong." Following a tour covering the 1976 presidential campaign in The Times' Washington bureau and a 1977 column on the national mood for The New York Times Magazine, he returned to South Africa in 1980, personally requesting the assignment. "For three years he traveled through crowded Black 'homelands' and white cities, documenting apartheid for Times articles and for his book on South Africa" ("Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White"), which received a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction alongside "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" by former Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas. McFadden added: "His second South Africa tour was followed by a two-year posting as a correspondent in London, after which he returned to write for The Times Magazine." He served as foreign editor from 1987-1989 and "succeeded Arthur Gelb as managing editor, the No. 2 job in the newsroom," in 1990, McFadden continued. Gerald M. Boyd lauded Lelyveld's commitment to journalists of color throughout his tenure in senior management. "Not only were there some journalists of color in management, but others held coveted assignments in Washington, on the national staff or abroad," Boyd wrote in his 2010 memoir. In later years, Lelyveld continued writing books (including an account of the final months of Franklin Roosevelt) and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He married his wife, Carolyn Fox, a fellow Bronx Science graduate, in 1959 and survived her upon her death in 2004. In addition to his longtime partner, journalist Janny Scott, Lelyveld's survivors include two daughters and a granddaughter.

Lai Pleads Not Guilty in National Security Trial:

Hong Kong businessman and publisher Jimmy Lai "pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a landmark trial, where he is accused of endangering China's national security, as prosecutors laid out details of what they said was collusion with foreign forces," according to Jessie Pang and Dorothy Kam of Reuters. Lai, who emerged in the mid-1990s as a stalwart critic of the Communist Party of China as the founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, "faces two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces - including calling for sanctions against Hong Kong and Chinese officials - under a China-imposed national security law," Pang and Kam continued. "[Appearing] calm as he sat in a glass dock surrounded by guards and a court filled with family, supporters and foreign diplomats," Lam pleaded not guility to the charges and an additional count of conspiracy to publish seditious material. According to Pang and Kam, "Western democracies [...] are watching closely, with the trial a diplomatic flashpoint and a test for Hong Kong's judicial independence and freedoms under the sweeping national security law China imposed in 2020." Prosecutor Anthony Chau "told the three high court judges that Lai was 'a radical figure' who conspired with others to bring 'hatred and stir up opposition' against Hong Kong and Chinese authorities" through 2019 meetings centered around potential sanctions with former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. These meetings allegedly included "activist Andy Li, exiled activist Finn Lau, Britain-based rights campaigner Luke de Pulford, Japanese politician Shiori Yamao, financier Bill Browder and others," while British activist Benedict Rogers, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former U.S. diplomat James Blair Cunningham also allegedly served as "intermediaries" between Lai and Western governments.  Britain and the United States "have called for Lai's immediate release, saying his trial is politically motivated," Pang and Kam added. Hong Kong authorities "dispute claims that Lai will not receive a fair trial, saying all are equal before the law and that the national security law has brought stability to Hong Kong after mass protests in 2019."

AI-Generated Misinformation Metastasizes in 2023:

Artificial intelligence "is automating the creation of fake news, spurring an explosion of web content mimicking factual articles that instead disseminates false information about elections, wars and natural disasters," Pranshu Verma of The Washington Post reported Sunday. Over the past seven months, websites "hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation." Verma continued: "Historically, propaganda operations have relied on armies of low-paid workers or highly coordinated intelligence organizations to build sites that appear to be legitimate. But AI is making it easy for nearly anyone — whether they are part of a spy agency or just a teenager in their basement — to create these outlets, producing content that is at times hard to differentiate from real news." For example, "one AI-generated article recounted a made-up story about Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, a NewsGuard investigation found, alleging that he had died and left behind a note suggesting the involvement of the Israeli prime minister." Although the story appears to have been fictitious, the claim was subsequently "eatured on an Iranian TV show, and it was recirculated on media sites in Arabic, English and Indonesian, and spread by users on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram." While Global Village Space (the website that published the psychiatrist story) "contains essays written by a Middle East think tank expert, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the site’s chief executive, Moeed Pirzada, a television news anchor from Pakistan," Verma said that "AI-generated articles" are "sandwiched in with these ordinary stories"; indeed, the psychiatrist story "was relabeled as 'satire' after NewsGuard reached out to the organization during its investigation." Jack Brewster, a researcher at NewsGuard, noted that "some stories are created manually, with people asking chatbots for articles that amplify a certain political narrative and posting the result to a website," while others employ "web scrapers searching for articles that contain certain keywords, and feeding those stories into a large language model that rewrites them to sound unique and evade plagiarism allegations." Even though many sites simply "churn out polarizing content to draw clicks and capture ad revenue" (often neglecting basic copyediting processes), Brewster cautioned that intelligence agencies will continue to "[use] AI-generated news for foreign influence campaigns" as the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches. "I would not be shocked at all that this is used — definitely next year with the elections," he said. "It's hard not to see some politician setting up one of these sites to generate fluff content about them and misinformation about their opponent." 

Ted Morgan (1932-2023):

1961 Local Reporting - Edition Time winner Ted Morgan died Wednesday at a nursing home in Manhattan from complications of dementia, his wife, Eileen Bresnahan Morgan, confirmed to Bob Drogin of The Washington Post. He was 91. A "dapper French count turned American journalist" who still employed his birth name of Sanche de Gramont, Morgan "was working the night rewrite desk at the New York Herald Tribune" on March 4, 1960 when "a call came in alerting the newsroom that Leonard Warren, a celebrated 48-year-old baritone, had collapsed onstage at the Metropolitan Opera after singing the Verdi aria 'Urna fatale del mio destino' ('Fatal urn of my destiny')," according to Drogin. Morgan "raced to the scene, several blocks away, and then sprinted back to his typewriter" with an imminent deadline. "There was an awesome moment as the singer fell," he wrote. "The rest of the cast remained paralyzed. Finally someone in the capacity audience called out 'For God’s sake, ring down the curtain.'" Morgan's report was subsequently cited by the Pulitzer Board as a "moving account of the death" and "propelled the career of the young reporter, who became a foreign correspondent dispatched to France, Congo and Vietnam before he embarked on a prolific career as an author," Drogin added. Between the late 1970s and the early 2010s, Morgan (who adopted his "forthright and practical, incisive and balanced" new name in the 1970s because he was "tired of seeing his byline misspelled") wrote biographies of such disparate figures as Winston Churchill (earning a 1983 Pulitzer Biography nomination for "Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874-1915"); the countercultural author/éminence grise William S. Burroughs; and Jay Lovestone, the onetime Communist Party USA leader who became an anti-communist CIA asset and close associate of counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton in the postwar era. Morgan, who "renounced his aristocratic title in 1977 when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen," was "born in Geneva on March 31, 1932, as Le Comte Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont, a scion of nobility from the Lower Navarre region of France," according to Drogin, who added: "His family name, de Gramont, dated 'to the morning of civilization,' he wrote, and his bewigged ancestors attended emperors and kings. His first name, Sanche, was a contraction of St. Charles." Raised "shuttling between France and the United States" (where his father, who died in World War II, was posted in Washington as a military attache), Morgan primarily attended the the French lycée in New York. After he dropped out of the the Sorbonne, a family friend "arranged for him to meet the president of Yale, A. Whitney Griswold, who invited him to complete his degree there." He graduated on time in 1954 and received a master's degree from the Columbia Journalism School a year later. Because of his French citizenship, he "was conscripted into the French army in 1956 and entered officers' training school in an effort to avoid duty in French-ruled Algeria, where he opposed efforts to put down an insurgency," Drogin continued. Ultimately posted as a "second lieutenant to a combat outpost south of Algiers, the capital," Morgan was horrified by the brutality of the war even as he "beat a prisoner to death during an interrogation." In later writings, he maintained that the incident left "a form of inner disfigurement that I've had to live with." Transferred to a military newspaper thereafter at the behest of a family friend, he "he was never charged with killing the unarmed prisoner or, later, helping a French military deserter flee the country." He eventually resumed his journalistic career at the Associated Press and joined the Herald Tribune (a morning broadsheet and "writer's newspaper" whose opinion pages tended to favor the liberal Republicanism of such figures as Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller) in 1959. After receiving his Pulitzer, Morgan was a Paris-based foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune, covering such locales as the Congo and Vietnam. By 1967, he was a freelance writer "when he permanently lost his hearing in one ear covering a French political campaign in subzero temperatures," Drogin added. In addition to his third wife, Morgan is survived by two children from his second marriage and four grandchildren. 

Russia Places Gessen on Wanted List:

Russian police "have put prominent Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen on a wanted list after opening a criminal case against them on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army," Dasha Litvinova of the Associated Press reported Friday. According to Litvinova, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona "was the first to report Friday that Gessen’s profile has appeared on the online wanted list of Russia’s Interior Ministry, and The Associated Press was able to confirm that it was. It wasn’t clear from the profile when exactly Gessen was added to the list." Last month, Russian media reported that a criminal case had been opened against Gessen (who is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns) stemming from their September 2022 interview with Russian journalist Yury Dud, who "discussed atrocities by Russian armed forces in Bucha, a Ukrainian town near Kyiv that was briefly occupied by the Russian forces." After Ukrainian troops found evidence of torture after reclaiming the town, Russian officials "have vehemently denied their forces were responsible and have prosecuted a number of Russian public figures for speaking out about Bucha, handing some lengthy prison terms." The prosecutions "were carried out under a new law Moscow adopted days after sending troops to Ukraine that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war deviating from the official narrative," Litvinova added, with the Kremlin continuing to insist on referring to the conflict as a "special military operation" confined to military targets. Because they hold Russian and American citizenship, Gessen (who resides in the U.S.) is unlikely to be extradited; however, a Russian court "could still try them in absentia and hand them a prison sentence of up to 10 years," according to Litvinova. 

Pulitzer-Winning 'Stolen' Cancelled Amid Spotify Contraction:

The audio streaming platform Spotify "said on Tuesday that it would not renew its contracts for two critically acclaimed podcasts" (the 2023 Audio Reporting Prize-winning "Stolen" and Jonathan Goldstein's "Heavyweight"), signaling that the company intends to "[curb] its podcasting ambitions as it struggles to become consistently profitable," Eduardo Medina of The New York Times reported Tuesday. The shows (nominally produced by Gimlet Media, the Brooklyn-founded digital media company initially acquired by Spotify in 2019) "will conclude their seasons and then have the option to shop their shows elsewhere," Medina added. A Spotify spokesperson said the company is "extremely proud of the teams who have supported these talented storytellers across each of the incredible episodes" of both series, also noting that Spotify will "work with the show creators to ensure a smooth transition for wherever these series go next." Created by veteran Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Connie Walker, "Stolen" is centered around her investigation of her "late father's life and his experience and that of hundreds of other Indigenous children in Canada's residential school system," according to Medina, with the Pulitzer Board citing the show's "[expert blend]" of a "personal search for answers" with "rigorous investigative reporting." The surprising decision "came a day after Spotify announced that it would cut nearly a fifth of its work force, its third round of layoffs so far this year, as it seeks consistent profitability", Medina continued; over the past year, the technology industry has experienced several rounds of layoffs as it grapples "with the end of a decade of rock-bottom interest rates that propelled its growth." In addition, Medina wrote, media companies "have also suffered from a shortfall of advertising revenue, partly fueled by leaner advertising budgets and economic anxieties about a possible recession that never quite happened." Although prominent podcast critic Nick Quah has suggested that the downturn has led "some large technology and media companies to maintain their investments in so-called 'always on' shows that publish daily or weekly" while "[reducing] their investments in limited run or seasonal series" that struggle to attain profitability, he remains sanguine about the future of the medium. "All of this is happening, this economic instability, but the fact of the matter is, there's still tons of podcast audiences," Quah said. "There's an existential way in which we're talking about the podcast industry at this point, but audiences have continued to grow." Indeed, a "2023 report from Edison Research about podcast consumers found that podcasts have more mainstream listeners than ever who are receptive to podcast ads," Medina continued, with "about 64 percent of the U.S. population older than 12 years old [having] listened to a podcast"; moreover, as many as 120 million people in the same demographic "had recently listened to a podcast." Although Spotify's $230 million acquisition of Gimlet spurred its costlier acquisition of Bill Simmons' The Ringer (centered around sports) and the respective acquisitions of competitors Wondery and Stitcher by Amazon and SiriusXM, "the boom, or at least the apparent potential to capitalize on that boom, faded, and Spotify was left with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product," Medina wrote. Eric Nuzum, an industry strategist and co-founder of the Magnificent Noise studio, added that "It quickly became clear that while much of the tech industry likes to 'fail fast' and 'move quickly,' that doesn't work with journalism that can take months or years to create, and needs to build an audience or brand"; indeed, the exclusivity of many Spotify podcasts to its platform also precluded further growth. "The problem is you pay all the money to acquire the talent and put no investment into making the product good," Nuzum said. "And I think that they got burned by that time and time and time again."

Black Poets Reflect on Cave Canem's Legacy:

In a feature for The New York Times, Stacy Y. China explored the enduring legacy of Cave Canem, the Black poets' fellowship that "has worked with poets who have gone on to win many of the genre’s most important accolades" since its founding in 1996. No fewer than six 21st century Poetry Prize winners (2007 winner Natasha Trethewey, 2012 winner Tracy K. Smith, 2015 winner Gregory Pardlo, 2017 winner Tyehimba Jess, 2020 winner Jericho Brown and 2023 winner Carl Phillips) have participated in its "weeklong annual retreats, prizes and fellowships," China added. "It started as a conversation," said co-founder Toi Derricotte, while fellow co-founder (and 1999 Drama finalist) Cornelius Eady soon realized that "my partner in crime has arrived." Currently held at the at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg campus in the outer suburbs of that city, the retreats "have earned an exacting reputation," with 15 fellows (culled from an applicant pool of more than 500) completing new poems "almost every morning" during their stays. According to China, "Those who are accepted attend the retreat for three years, so each one has a mix of first-, second- and third-year fellows, which helps to bring together a range of generations and work experiences," with Director of Programs Dante Micheaux "[recalling] one year when the youngest fellow was in his late teens, and the oldest in her early 90s." (Fellows are present for 21 days over the three-year period.) Jess, who currently serves as president of Cave Canem's board of directors, had "thought that he had seen and heard a lot coming from the slam poetry world" during his first stay in 1997 before a series of workshops proved to be a fulcrumatic moment in his life: "The more people got up, the more I realized how much I had to learn," he said. Mellon Foundation President and Pulitzer Prize Board member Elizabeth Alexander, a founding faculty member, said that "Cave Canem is the organization dearest to my heart," noting that it was "was well worth it for 'the opportunity to be in community with ourselves [...] As a teacher, I was not the only one, either." Although Derricotte (now 82) and Eady (69) "have largely left the teaching and administration of the group to others," the éminences grises "are optimistic that their experiment will go on," with Derricotte concluding that the "need" and "desire [...] is still there."

David Del Tredici (1937-2023):

1980 Music winner David Del Tredici "died on Saturday at his home in Greenwich Village" in New York City, according to an obituary by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times. He was 86. "Flamboyant and gregarious, [...] Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted," Kozinn wrote. "But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them. And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase 'Bad Boy of Music,' [...] Del Tredici could easily have adopted it himself." Emerging somewhat indirectly from the mid-century milieu of academic modernism (much as Johnny Cash and Charlie Rich refused to acclimate completely to the Sun Records rockabilly sound in popular music, Del Tredici never mustered a particular ardor for seralism, noting in 1980 that he "always liked to have some overriding expressive element" while employing "serial techniques"; indeed, two early settings of Joyce texts, "Night-Conjure Verse" (1965) and "Syzygy" (1966), "showed how vividly angular, athletic vocal lines and pointillistic instrumental writing could magnify a work's emotional depths"), Del Tredici became best known as an early paragon of neoromanticism in a series of works inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books, including his Pulitzer-winning "In Memory of a Summer Day" (1980) and the controversial "Final Alice" (1975; "packed with hummable melodies, as well as just enough chaotic brashness to keep its late-20th-century provenance clear," according to Kozinn). After surmounting his addiction and experiencing the AIDS-related 1993 death of his partner, Paul Arcomano, he "turned to reclaiming some of the dissonance and grittiness of his early works, though without abandoning the melodic richness that had become one of his hallmarks," Kozinn continued, culminating in a series of "vocal works about gay sexuality, a subject he felt had been ignored by classical composers"; some of these works were bowdlerized by performing organizations or eschewed altogether, with "My Favorite Penis Poems" (2002) not receiving its premiere until six years after its composition. "For me, like any composer, if you feel like you’re going in a place that has not been gone, it's very exciting," he reflected in an interview with American Public Radio in 2002. "I think that when I set a text that’s shocking, I'm thrilled. You can set love poems, but you can't set sex poems, or gay poetry. It's still not OK. As an out gay composer, I kind of mourn that fact." Born to an accountant and homemaker in Cloverdale, Calif. (a small city midway between Santa Rosa and Ukiah that is often considered to be the northernmost municipality of the San Francisco Bay Area), Del Tredici began studying piano in 1948 and gave his first public performance in San Francisco in 1953. He continued to envision himself as a performer for much of his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, only pivoting to composition after encountering a bellicose piano teacher at the Aspen Music Festival and School in the summer of 1958. The ensuing work ("Soliloquy") was praised by Les Six member and influential modernist composer Darius Milhaud, prompting Del Tredici to soon enroll in a Seymour Shifrin composition course that included a coterie of early minimalists -- La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros among them -- as fellow students. Following graduation, he enrolled in Princeton's M.F.A. composition program, where he studied under two-time Pulitzer winner Roger Sessions and embraced dissonance in earnest. Del Tredici is survived by a sister; two brothers; and six nieces and nephews. Throughout his career, he taught at a variety of institutions (notably instructing 2003 Music winner John Adams, often considered to be a fellow neoromantic, at Harvard), eventually settling at the City College of New York, from which he retired in 2015.

Philip Meyer (1930-2023):

Seminal computer-assisted reporting specialist Philip Meyer died on November 4th at his home in Carrboro, N.C. from complications of Parkinson's disease. He was 93. "With a career spanning the latter half of the 20th century and several years into the 21st, [...] Meyer was at the center of a revolution within the craft and business of journalism — a revolution that, to a large degree, he helped shape," wrote Clay Risen of The New York Times. "When he began working as an assistant editor at The Topeka Daily Capital in Kansas in the mid-1950s, computers were room-size, turtle-speed contraptions, and reporting was done mostly through interviews, with the occasional trip to the library or the government records office. [...] Meyer was among the few reporters who saw the growing power of computers to crunch data and produce new insight into complex questions." After studying mainframes and early computer languages on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard during the 1966-67 academic year, Meyer (heretofore a national correspondent for The Akron Beacon Journal) transferred to the Detroit Free Press (then a Knight-Ridder sister paper) amid the city's summer 1967 uprising. Combining his new expertise with coverage of the breaking news event, Meyer "immediately seized on a claim, common in the news media, that the rioters had mostly been poor, uneducated Black migrants from the South," according to Risen. "He gathered as much demographic data as he could, ran it through a computer and got a much different picture: The rioters were more likely to be locally born, and were spread evenly across the socioeconomic spectrum." This analysis was an integral part of the Free Press' 1968 Local General or Spot News Reporting Prize-winning staff coverage of the uprising, which first catapulted a wide array of the publication's journalists (including Academy Award-winning screenwriter Kurt Luedtke, longtime Playboy executive Derick Daniels and public service columnist Tom Wark) to national prominence. Ensconced as a "leading thinker on bringing social-science methods into reporting," Meyer eventually began work on "Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods" (1973), a text "today considered one of the most important books about reporting ever written." Although he still faced "built-up resistance" among contemporaneous editors (exemplified by a notable backlash to "Crime and Injustice," a 1973 Barlett & Steele series that employed Meyer as a computational consultant to "analyze whether judges were too lenient on violent offenders"), this skepticism eventually ebbed as "computers became central to daily life and reporters became comfortable with using data in a rigorous fashion, not as a replacement for traditional methods but as a supplement — a change instigated and guided by [...] Meyer," Risen continued. Raised by a hardware proprietor and a teacher in Clay Center, Kan. (near the Nebraska border), Meyer began exploring the interstices between journalism and technology while enrolled at Kansas State University, where he received his undergraduate degree in technical journalism in 1952. After completing his military service obligation as a Navy public information officer, he joined The Topeka Daily Capital as an editor in 1954; there, he met his wife, Sue Quail, who died in 2021. Upon completing a master's degree in political science at the University of North Carolina in 1958, he joined the Miami Herald as an education reporter before moving to The Beacon Journal. Following the conferral of the Free Press' Pulitzer, he continued in his national correspondent role at Knight-Ridder for a decade. As the newspaper chain's director of news research from 1978 to 1981, he worked on the testing phase of "Bowsprit," an early iteration of the Viewtron videotex service that could be accessed through AT&T Sceptre terminals. Returning to UNC in 1981 as the Knight chair in journalism, he retired in 2008, taking emeritus status thereafter. Meyer is survived by three daughters; a brother; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A fourth daughter died in 2020.

Jane Garrett (1935-2023):

Longtime Knopf history editor Jane Garrett died on October 12 at her home in Middlebury, Vt. from complications of Alzheimer's disease. She was 88. During her 44-year tenure, Garrett "guided seven books to Pulitzer Prizes for history but watched another book lose its prestigious Bancroft Prize over scholars' criticism of the author's research," according to Richard Sandomir of The New York Times. Beginning with the bestowal of the 1973 History Prize to "People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the History of American Civilization,” by Michael Kammen, Garrett shepherded the development of such works as "Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution,” by her mentor, Bernard Bailyn (winner of the 1987 Prize); "The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876," by Robert V. Bruce (winner of the 1988 Prize) and Alan Taylor's "William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic" (which received the 1996 Prize). "[The proposal] was pretty academic, so she asked, 'Can you rework this and draw the characters out more?' and I got a contract," said Taylor. "It was the first time I got paid upfront for anything." Sandomir added: " Taylor later learned that [...] Garrett had already had an interest in the Coopers, which she had not mentioned to him. While doing research in the Cooper family archives at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., he found a box with her name on it. 'She said, 'Oh, yeah, I’m an old family friend of the Coopers,' he recalled her telling him. A direct descendant of the family had asked her to organize the papers." Several years later, Michael Bellesiles' Garrett-edited "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" (2000) received the 2001 Bancroft Prize before "scholars documented serious errors in [...] Bellesiles' research and said that he had misused historical records," leading to the rescindment of the award. "I still do not believe in any shape or form he fabricated anything," Garrett told The Associated Press in 2003 after Knopf withdrew the book. "He's just a sloppy researcher." Born in Dover, Del., Garrett received her undergraduate degree in history from the University of Delaware in 1957. While employed as assistant to the director of the the Boston Athenaeum library from 1959 to 1968, she assisted Bailyn while he researched "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” a pathbreaking text that received the 1968 History Prize. Although she worked as an editor at Knopf beginning in 1967, "she stopped working in the company's Manhattan office in the mid-1970s and began working at home, first in Cornwall, Vt., and later in Leeds, Mass," Sandomir continued. During the early years of this period, she studied in the Diocesan Studies Program at the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont and at the Hartford Seminary, eventually attaining ordination as a deacon (1980) and priest (1981) in the Episcopal Church despite never completing an advanced degree. Garrett "also edited best sellers, including 'A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam' (1993), by Karen Armstrong, and 'The Road From Coorain' (1989), a memoir by Jill Ker Conway, the feminist author and first woman to become president of Smith College." Her marriage to Wendell Garrett, the former editor of Antiques magazine, ended in divorce, leaving no immediate survivors. “Some people think that may be a record," she said of her association with Pulitzer-winning books in 1996 during a conversation with CSPAN's Brian Lamb. "I don't know. There really isn't any way to know. And I hope I have a few more." (Shortly thereafter, Jack Rakove's "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution" became her seventh History winner.)