"If you want a monument to Roger Wood, look around you at the state of mainstream-media journalism — conformist, dull, dishonest, and lacking any sense of excitement. That is what New York journalism would have been like in the 1980s and 1990s if Roger Wood had not been editor of the New York Post. R.I.P."
The Spark of the Post | National Review Online
The remarkable Roger Wood
5-2-13
Roger Wood, who died last November and whose memorial service will be held this morning at St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City, was the editor of the New York Post in the 1970s and 1980s who more than doubled his newspaper’s circulation and made the city’s journalism brasher, livelier, braver, and better.
His editorship was the era of the Post’s famous shock-horror headlines: “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” “Boy Gulps Gas, Explodes,” “Gadaffy Goes Daffy,” and “Eleven Dead and the Band Played On.”
Though these headlines were described as “neo-expressionist poetry” and worse, Roger would point out that they were no more than the literal facts of the case vividly expressed. It was just that he was an editor who pressed his reporters to pursue the facts of the case where other papers quailed or got squeamish. He was indeed the equal in imagination and drive of a Hearst or a Pulitzer.
Yet he looked anything but the part. Always dressed in a blue blazer, fawn or grey slacks, and a white shirt (occasionally supplemented by an odd Victorian shawl), usually smiling amiably as he padded around the newsroom, addressing men as “dear boy” and women as “lovely one,” Roger would have seemed perfectly at home at the 19th hole of some suburban golf club in southern England.
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His editorship was the era of the Post’s famous shock-horror headlines: “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” “Boy Gulps Gas, Explodes,” “Gadaffy Goes Daffy,” and “Eleven Dead and the Band Played On.”
Though these headlines were described as “neo-expressionist poetry” and worse, Roger would point out that they were no more than the literal facts of the case vividly expressed. It was just that he was an editor who pressed his reporters to pursue the facts of the case where other papers quailed or got squeamish. He was indeed the equal in imagination and drive of a Hearst or a Pulitzer.
Yet he looked anything but the part. Always dressed in a blue blazer, fawn or grey slacks, and a white shirt (occasionally supplemented by an odd Victorian shawl), usually smiling amiably as he padded around the newsroom, addressing men as “dear boy” and women as “lovely one,” Roger would have seemed perfectly at home at the 19th hole of some suburban golf club in southern England.
-go to link-
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