Alan M. Segal, former associate editor of The New York Times, has had a profound impact on the paper’s policies and practices for 30 years as a rigorous and unquestioning arbiter of language, taste, tone and ethics. but died at home on Wednesday. in Manhattan. he was 82 years old.
His wife, Gretchen Liefmans, confirmed the death. She did not specify the cause, but he had been dealing with heart problems for years.
Segal, who joined The Times as a copyboy in 1960, was widely respected, often revered and sometimes feared in the newsroom. Although never the face of The Times — he worked in relative anonymity — he was something of a collective conscience, the ultimate institution to watch over the customs he was often asked to codify. was a philosopher.
He was a senior editor with William G. Connolly who met Mr. Segal in the late 1990s when he was a copyboy at the newspaper’s headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan off Times Square. Together, they edited a revised and expanded edition of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, a reference guide for news outlets and journalists around the country.
“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we do what they do about what we don’t know,” said one of Segal’s favorite mandates. media outlets began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another example: “Being fair is better than being the best.”
Mr. Segal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was extensive. But no subject was more authoritative than The Times.
“Al seemed to know all about the Times,” Connolly once said. “When he was 19 or his 20s, he made paper his life and his religion.”
Early in his career at The Times, Mr. Segal played a key role in the newspaper’s news coverage.
As Foreign News Editor of the Night, he helped shape coverage of the Vietnam War and was part of the team that edited The Times’ landmark report on secret government research that became known as the Pentagon Papers. He oversaw the conversion of the newsroom to electronic typesetting in the late 1970s, and in 1980 organized a national news operation that was the driving force behind The Times’ subsequent growth.
In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which reporter Jason Blair’s fabrication led to the downfall of two top newsroom managers, Segal led an internal committee to review the newspaper’s ethical and organizational practices. .
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job, the Standards Editor. Mr. Segal was the first to be nominated for this position, adding to the title of Associate Editor-in-Chief, which he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. Editorial The masthead shown on her page was more than twice as long as hers on others.
Editor-in-chief Max Frankel, who promoted Segal to deputy editor-in-chief, called him “a symbol of the inside man’s illustrious career.”
In a 2005 interview for the obituary, Mr. Frankel added, “I promoted him to let people know that the New York Times has great careers available to non-reporters.” It passed wonderfully.
“I used to call him ‘Poober,'” Frankel continued. “He had seven or eight portfolios that controlled every aspect of The Times production, news output, and all the rules and regulations. It was a drawer full of contracts with businesses about what to fill in. And where did the advertising go? The entire design and construction of the paper was in his hands.”
But Mr. Segal was temperamentally reluctant to defy the chain of command.
“Al’s knowledge of current affairs, and his knowledge of broad journalism ethics, was always second to none,” Evan Jenkins, a fellow editor at Newsdesk, recalled in 2005. The emperor may not have been clothed, and there were times when he did.”
Mr. Segal was able to dry the criticism. His after-the-fact critiques of subordinate editors and reporters — precise handwriting with a green felt-tip pen (known to staff as a “greenie”, which he discovered resembles a black-and-white newspaper) Written in law — concisely like “Hmm!” “How?” “Name name” and “Ridiculous!”
Once, I noticed that a headline required combining several complex elements in a short word count, and the result was “as if written by a Martian pedant.”
But his rockets were also astute and didactic, guiding generations of editors and reporters in finer detail of style and tone. Memos became more and more important. “Like who?” was his trademark comment when he thought headlines and captions by anonymous editors were particularly artistic. (Answers, with the editor’s name, appear in the postmortem edits the next day, are stapled on the photocopier, and distributed throughout the news department.)
Other reviews showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpy spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subtitle that included a reference to “foie gras, not foie gras.” When the headline read that football coach Mike Ditka should “recover” from a heart attack, Segal wrote:
Former Times editor Bill Keller said, “He was known for being a man of integrity, but he was able to apply it without being rude and honest.
“When he was hospitalized for heart surgery, he joked with some people that some of his colleagues would be surprised to find out he had a heart,” Keller added.
Alan Marshall Segal was born on May 1, 1940 in the Bronx to Irving and Sylvia (Vrubel) Segal. His father, who immigrated from Poland when he was a teenager, ran a seltzer delivery company. Irving later became the landlord and Alan worked as a handyman in his building. His mother was a housewife.
Alan attended Christopher Columbus High School in the northeastern Bronx, where he learned French and was the editor of the school newspaper.
He was offered a scholarship by New York University and a position as a copyboy at The Times while still an undergraduate.
With a degree in journalism from New York University, Segal joined the Foreign Desk as a copy editor in 1963, and after a brief stint with ABC News, wrote for anchor Peter Jennings in 1966, and in 1971 I was promoted to assistant foreign editor. The year he worked at the Pentagon Papers.
The Times was so concerned that the government would realize it had the documents and try to seize them before they could be made public, that it set up a secret newsroom in New York’s Hilton Hotel a few blocks away. Did. To relieve tension, Mr. Segal brought a rubber duck to his colleague’s bath.
In addition to his stint at ABC, he had one more writing job. It was a reporter covering The Bronx for The Times in 1974. His editor liked his work. One article on women’s unexpected births began: Hattie Thomas entered her daughter’s kindergarten as a mother of three children and moved away from being a mother of her four children. “
Segal tried reporting for better career prospects at a newspaper whose senior editors were all reporters. However, he found his writing painful and returned to editing at his foreign desk.
He was named news editor for the paper in 1977, overseeing the design and editing of the front page and was the editor of Winners & Sinners, the paper’s internal review of writing, editing and visual presentation founded by his predecessor. I was in charge of production. , Theodore M. Bernstein. In 1987, he was promoted to assistant editor-in-chief.
In early 2002, long before same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, Mr. Segal was appointed chairman of the standards committee and eventually helped change the Times’ policy to publish same-sex marriage announcements on the association’s page. recommended. Until now, the newspaper had limited its publication to marriages legally recognized in the United States, but in August of the same year, it published a “report on homosexual pledge ceremonies and certain formal registrations of gay and lesbian partnerships.” ” announced that it will start issuing
Segal married Liefmans, then a freelance manuscript editor, in 1977. He battled obesity for most of his life and lost a staggering amount of weight before his daughter Anna was born. He told his friends that if he had a baby he would put him in his lap. He later regained much of his weight.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Anna Segal. son peter. and his granddaughter.
Mr. Segal’s dedication to The Times was so comprehensive that virtually no detail, even in the obituary’s list of survivors, escaped his attention.
In the revised Times Stylebook, which he co-edited in the 1990s, an entry on obituaries contains the following advice: But a well-constructed, fuller one would pay attention to the basics early on and end with an anecdote or a memorable paragraph. “
Mr. Segal did not have that intention in mind, but he himself provided the final paragraph when he succinctly summarized his views on newspaper style in the stylebook’s preface.
“The best style depends on the ear and sight of the reporter,” he wrote. In that setting, strange language, syncopation, or deviations in logic are suddenly glimpsed, and the reader knows that there is something richer than a time signal here.
Alex Traub contributed to the report.