Allan M. Siegal, a former assistant managing editor of The New York Occasions who left a deep imprint on the newspaper’s insurance policies and practices as its exacting and unquestioned arbiter of language, style, tone and ethics for 30 years, died on Wednesday at his house in Manhattan. He was 82.
His spouse, Gretchen Leefmans, confirmed the dying. She didn’t specify a trigger however mentioned he had handled coronary heart points for a few years.
Mr. Siegal, who began at The Occasions as a replica boy in 1960, was extensively revered, typically revered and typically feared within the newsroom. Although by no means the face of The Occasions — he labored in relative anonymity — he was one thing like its collective conscience, the last word institutionalist watching over a spot whose folkways he was typically known as on to codify.
He did so within the late Nineties with William G. Connolly, a senior editor who had met Mr. Siegal once they have been copy boys within the paper’s headquarters on West forty third Avenue in Manhattan, off Occasions Sq.. The 2 edited a revised and expanded version of “The New York Occasions Guide of Fashion and Utilization,” a information consulted by information organizations and journalists nationwide.
“Readers will imagine extra of what we do know if we stage with them about what we don’t” was one among Mr. Siegal’s favourite injunctions, articulated lengthy earlier than media retailers within the digital period started emphasizing transparency in information gathering and enhancing.
One other: “Being honest is healthier than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s data of grammar, historical past, geography, nomenclature, tradition and delicacies was expansive. However on no topic was he extra authoritative than The Occasions itself.
“Al knew every part about The Occasions, it appeared,” Mr. Connolly as soon as mentioned. “On the age of 19 or 20, he had made the paper his life and his faith.”
Mr. Siegal had a major hand within the paper’s information report early in his Occasions profession.
As night time overseas information editor, he helped form protection of the Vietnam Battle and was a part of the staff that edited The Occasions’s landmark report of the key authorities research that got here to be often known as the Pentagon Papers. He oversaw the newsroom’s conversion to digital typesetting within the late Seventies, and in 1980 he organized the information operation for a nationwide version, an engine of The Occasions’s subsequent development.
In 2003, within the aftermath of a scandal through which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the autumn of the newsroom’s prime two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an inside committee that reviewed the paper’s moral and organizational practices.
Amongst its suggestions was the creation of a brand new job: requirements editor. Mr. Siegal was the primary to be named to the place, including the title to that of assistant managing editor, a put up he held from 1987 till his retirement in 2006. On the time, his identify had been listed among the many paper’s prime editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial web page, greater than twice so long as anybody else’s.
Max Frankel, the manager editor who promoted Mr. Siegal to assistant managing editor, known as him “a shining image of the profession of an inside man.”
“Elevating him was supposed to serve discover that there’s a distinguished profession obtainable at The Occasions for non-reporters,” Mr. Frankel added, in an interview for this obituary in 2005. “It was a peculiar type of affirmative motion, however he was fantastically certified.
“I used to name him ‘Pooh-Bah,’” Mr. Frankel continued. “He had seven or eight portfolios that dominated each facet of the manufacturing of The Occasions, the output of stories, and all the foundations and rules — drawers stuffed with contracts with the enterprise facet as to how a lot area we acquired, and the way we crammed it, and the place the adverts went. The entire design and construction of the paper was in his palms.”
However Mr. Siegal was temperamentally reluctant to buck the chain of command.
“Al’s data of present affairs — and of broad journalistic ethics — was all the time proper up there with anybody’s,” Evan Jenkins, a fellow editor on the information desk, recalled in 2005. However, he added, “he was not one to counsel that maybe the emperor had no garments, and there have been occasions when that was so.”
Mr. Siegal was able to withering criticism. His autopsy critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in exact penmanship with a inexperienced felt-tip pen (often known as “greenies” among the many workers, they confirmed up effectively towards black-and-white newsprint, he discovered) — may very well be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Title names” and “Absurd!”
As soon as, having demanded {that a} headline mix a number of complicated components in a brief phrase rely, he discovered the outcome wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
However his rockets have been additionally astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters within the finer factors of fashion and tone. And maybe as a result of he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of reward have been cherished all of the extra. “Good, who?” was his trademark remark when he thought a headline or caption, by an nameless editor, was particularly suave. (The reply, the identify of the editor, would seem — to the editor’s nice pleasure — within the subsequent day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled collectively by copy machine and distributed all through the information division.)
Different critiques confirmed a biting humorousness. “If this bumpkin spelling is the perfect we are able to do,” he as soon as wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (relatively than foie gras), “we should always follow chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the soccer coach Mike Ditka “ought to get better” from a coronary heart assault, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Until God returns our name, we shouldn’t predict in such circumstances.”
“He was famously a person of integrity,” mentioned the previous Occasions govt editor Invoice Keller, “however he managed to use it with out being a dispenser of prudish rectitude, and actually made good sport of his popularity as the home disciplinarian.”
“When he entered the hospital to have his coronary heart labored on,” Mr. Keller added, “he joked to a few people who some colleagues could be stunned to be taught he had a coronary heart.”
Allan Marshall Siegal was born on Could 1, 1940, within the Bronx to Irving and Sylvia (Wrubel) Siegal. His father, who had immigrated from Poland as a teen, ran a seltzer supply firm for a time, and younger Allan would assist ship bottles to clients round Pelham Parkway. Irving later grew to become a landlord, and Allan would work as a handyman in his buildings. His mom was a homemaker.
Allan attended Christopher Columbus Excessive College, within the northeast Bronx, the place he realized French and was the editor of the varsity newspaper.
He was supplied a scholarship by New York College, and whereas nonetheless an undergraduate he was supplied a spot at The Occasions as a replica boy. He began on Sept. 11, 1960.
Armed with a journalism diploma from N.Y.U., Mr. Siegal joined the overseas desk as a replica editor in 1963 and, after a quick sojourn at ABC Information, writing for the anchor Peter Jennings in 1966, he was promoted to assistant overseas editor in 1971, the 12 months he labored on the Pentagon Papers.
The Occasions was so involved that the federal government would possibly discover out that it had the paperwork and attempt to seize them earlier than publication that it arrange what amounted to a secret newsroom within the New York Hilton resort, a number of blocks away. To interrupt the stress, Mr. Siegal introduced rubber duckies to a colleague for his baths.
Along with his stint at ABC, he had one different writing job: as a reporter protecting the Bronx for The Occasions in 1974. His editors favored his work. One article, a couple of lady’s surprising supply, started, “Mrs. Hattie Thomas arrived at her daughter’s kindergarten the mom of three, and left the mom of 4.”
Mr. Siegal had tried reporting to reinforce his profession prospects at a paper whose senior editors had all been reporters. However he discovered writing to be painful and returned to enhancing on the overseas desk.
He was named information editor of the paper in 1977, chargeable for overseeing the design and enhancing of the entrance web page, and for producing “Winners & Sinners,” the paper’s in-house critique of writing, enhancing and visible presentation, based by a predecessor, Theodore M. Bernstein. He was promoted to assistant managing editor in 1987.
In early 2002, lengthy earlier than same-sex marriages have been legalized in the US, Mr. Siegal was named to go a requirements committee that finally really helpful a change in Occasions coverage on publishing bulletins of same-sex unions in its society pages. The place the paper had beforehand restricted bulletins to marriages legally acknowledged in the US, it declared in August that 12 months that it might start publishing “reviews of same-sex dedication ceremonies and of some forms of formal registration of homosexual and lesbian partnerships.”
Mr. Siegal married Ms. Leefmans, then a contract manuscript editor, in 1977. He battled weight problems for a lot of his life, shedding a prodigious quantity of weight earlier than his daughter, Anna, was born. He informed buddies that if he was going to have a child, he wished to have the ability to maintain it on his lap. He later regained a lot of the burden.
Along with his spouse, he’s survived by his daughter, Anna Siegal; a son, Peter; and a granddaughter.
Mr. Siegal’s devotion to The Occasions was so all-encompassing that nearly no element escaped his discover — not even the itemizing of survivors in an obituary.
Within the revised Occasions stylebook that he co-edited within the Nineties, the entry on obituaries consists of this recommendation: “Survivors must be listed on the finish of a routine obituary. However a fuller one, if artfully constructed, will attend to the fundamentals earlier and finish with an anecdote or in any other case memorable paragraph.”
Mr. Siegal offered a closing paragraph himself — although not with that intention in thoughts — when he succinctly summed up his views about newspaper type within the preface of the stylebook that he had so assiduously helped to assemble.
“The very best of fashion depends on reporters’ ears and eyesight,” he wrote, “and on simplicity — the unpretentious language of a letter to an urbane and literate good friend. In that setting, the sudden glimmer of an uncommon phrase, a syncopation or a swerve in logic lets the reader know that right here is one thing richer than an hourly bulletin.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
