Gerald Boyd occupied a particularly prominent position as one of the few senior African-American journalists and editors in the US media firmament. His career at The New York Times, where he had risen to the post of managing editor, was cut short by the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal.
The episode, in 2003, caused severe damage to The New York Times’s reputation as America’s newspaper of record and was seized upon by rightwing commentators and bloggers eager to depict the paper as a complacent bulwark of the liberal establishment. Mainstream journalists were already under scrutiny after a similar scandal at the New Republic magazine, and allegations that the newspaper was portraying the presidency of George W. Bush in an unduly negative light.
Against the backdrop of a controversial restructuring of The New York Times newsroom, emotions were already running high at the paper. When it finally became public, the Blair case led to the resignation of Boyd and the executive editor, Howell Raines. Blair, an immensely ambitious but inexperienced reporter with a cocaine problem and a knack for cutting corners, had indulged in a series of increasingly outrageous fabrications over a long period. Colleagues at the paper had raised their concerns early on, but Boyd and Raines continued to express confidence in him, assigning him to major stories.
When Blair was finally exposed after plagiarising another newspaper’s story, Raines and Boyd were accused of overpromoting the black reporter in a clumsy attempt to foster greater racial diversity in the newsroom. Other observers, though, argued that the prime ingredients in the affair were old-fashioned favouritism and newsroom power-plays. Raines, in particular, had made a number of enemies through his imperious management style.
Blair was later able to cash in on his notoriety by writing a self-justifying memoir, published under the melodramatic title Burning Down My Masters’ House. After an inquiry into Blair’s malpractice, the newspaper ran a correction covering several pages, admitting: “The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”
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For Boyd, who had once described himself as “a selfabsorbed, arrogant S.O.B”, the episode overshadowed an exceptionally impressive career that had begun in his home town of St Louis. At 28 he became the youngest journalist to win a prestigious Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard. His mother died when he was young, and his father, an alcoholic, played little or no part in his upbringing, which was largely supervised by Boyd’s grandmother.
He majored in journalism at the University of Missouri, and joined the St Louis PostDispatch in 1973. He played a significant role in encouraging black school students to enter journalism through a training programme that he helped to organise. He joined his paper’s Washington bureau in 1978 and moved to The New York Times in 1983. After a string of major reporting assignments, he was fast-tracked for a senior role under the aegis of the executive editor Max Frankel.
By 2001 Boyd had been appointed as the paper’s first African-American managing editor. Along with Raines he won acclaim for supervising the coverage of the 9/11 attacks. Boyd later described those days and weeks as the proudest moment of his career: “What we had to deal with was much more than just the journalism. Our city and nation were under assault and emotional drain was as huge as the story.”
Almost a decade earlier, Boyd had been a central figure in the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the first World Trade Centre bombing. He also had a major hand in two other series of pieces that won Pulitzers, one on child poverty, the other a sequence of meditations on the dynamics of race in America. Boyd believed that the racial divide was a subject that the American media still needed to confront. As he once explained in a lecture: “Throughout my life I have enjoyed both the blessing and the burden of being the first black this and the first black that, and like many minorities and women who succeed, I’ve often felt alone.”
Boyd’s ambition had always been to have his name appear on the masthead at The New York Times. After his abrupt departure, he worked as a journalism consultant, notably at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A sports aficionado and jazz lover, he was also able to devote more time to his young son by his third marriage. He was found to have lung cancer this year.
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He is survived by his third wife, Robin Stone, and son.
Gerald Boyd, journalist, was born on October 3, 1950. He died on November 23, 2006, aged 56