Former NYT editor Rosenthal dead

NEW YORK: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Managing Editor of the New York Times AM Rosenthal, who also served as foreign correspondent in India, has died. He was 84.
 
Rosenthal, who lifted the daily from economic doldrums in the 1970s as also oversaw its economic upturn, modernization and change in its journalistic style during the 17 crucial years he headed the paper, died of a complication of stroke he suffered two weeks ago.
 
He began his 60-year career at the Times as campus reporter at $12 a week salary and reported for the paper from the United Nations at the time it was established in 1946, India, Japan, Poland and other regions.
 
He served the paper for 19 years as reporter and 23 years as metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, managing editor and executive editor.
 
His coverage of the Warsaw communist regime in the late 1950s earned him expulsion from the country and journalism awards -- the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and the first of two Polk awards.

 

In 1969, he took over the helm of the New York Times when the paper was in financial distress. As a managing editor and later as executive editor he brought about sweeping changes to expand advertising and readership.

 

In 1971, he played an important role in the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. He oversaw the coverage of the war in
Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, the Cold War, the crisis in the Middle East.