R. Bruce Dold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Chicago Tribune who rose to become editor in chief and publisher and who, in 2008, steered its center-right editorial page to support Barack Obama, in the paper’s first-ever endorsement of a Democrat for president, died on Dec. 3 in Winnetka, Ill. He was 70.
His death, at the home of his daughter Kristen Dold, was from esophageal cancer, his daughter Megan Dold said.
During his 42 years at The Tribune, Mr. Dold covered city, state and national politics. He joined the editorial board in 1990 and ascended the masthead to become editorial page editor, a job he held from 2000 to 2016, followed by four years as editor in chief and publisher.
As a member of the editorial board in 1994, he won the Pulitzer for a series denouncing the Illinois child welfare system for failing to protect a 3-year-old boy from his violent mother, who was charged with his murder. The series ran in tandem with news reporting on the case and helped encourage the passage of a state law reforming the child-welfare system.
Under Mr. Dold’s leadership of the editorial page, the board changed its decades-long support of the death penalty in 2007, arguing that “government can’t provide certainty that the innocent will not be put to death.” Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011.
Peter Kendall, a former managing editor of The Tribune, said Mr. Dold “had an unfair abundance of newspapering skills: He could write, he could edit, he could really think.”
The paper, which was founded before the Civil War, helped put Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1860 and, for nearly a century and a half, predictably endorsed Republicans for president. “That ended in 2008, when the paper started backing the best candidate regardless of party,” Gerould Kern, a former Tribune editor in chief, wrote in a recent Facebook post about Mr. Dold. “Bruce made that happen.”
In his unsigned editorial endorsing Mr. Obama, the one-term U.S. senator from Illinois, Mr. Dold noted that the paper’s opinion pages had long been “a proponent of conservative principles,” but went on to lament that the Republican Party had “lost its way” by allowing federal debt to soar. He faulted the G.O.P. nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for failing “in his most important executive decision” by picking an unqualified running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
“We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago,” Mr. Dold wrote of Chicago’s hometown politician, citing the frequent crossfire the editorial board had subjected Mr. Obama to in meetings with him. “We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.”
The paper also endorsed Mr. Obama for re-election in 2012.
Ann Marie Lipinski, who was the editor in chief of the paper in 2008 — and the masthead leader to whom Mr. Dold reported — said in an interview that she never knew how he himself voted in elections.
As editorial page editor, “you have to write as the institutional voice of a newspaper, and Bruce did it magnificently,” Ms. Lipinski, who went on to head the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, said. “He never betrayed the paper or misunderstood the assignment.”
Described as restrained and even gentlemanly, Mr. Dold was also known for his tough, incisive questioning of political candidates who appeared before the editorial board.
In 2015, though, a neophyte politician named Donald Trump proved difficult to interrogate. As Mr. Dold sought to drill down on his inexperience as a candidate for the White House, Mr. Trump filibustered.
John P. McCormick, another board member, took a different tack, beginning a question, “Mr. Trump, you’re clearly gifted at business and finance …”
Mr. Trump jumped in before he could finish, as Mr. McCormick recalled in an interview: “Trump slaps the table and says, ‘Bruce, Bruce! I like him. I like him better than you.’”
Mr. Dold was a member of a generation drawn to journalism by the aggressive reporting on White House corruption during Watergate, and his leadership at The Tribune coincided with the internet era that hollowed out most newspapers and forced many out of business.
The Tribune Company, which held a string of TV stations and papers, including The Los Angeles Times, suffered though owners who ordered waves of staff reductions. In December 2008, the company filed for bankruptcy protection.
The same month, federal prosecutors said that Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat, had illegally tried to pressure The Tribune to fire editorial writers who criticized him, in exchange for the state’s help with a business transaction. (Mr. Blagojevich later went to prison for trying to sell Mr. Obama’s vacated Senate seat. President Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s sentence in 2020.)
The Tribune did not fire any editorial writers, and Mr. Dold said he was never told of the governor’s pressure on Tribune executives. He heard of it when law enforcement officials held a news conference. He took Mr. Blagojevich’s attempted meddling as a backhanded compliment.
“You run an editorial page and you always want to have impact,” he told The New York Times.
Robert Bruce Dold was born on March 9, 1955, in Newark and grew up in nearby Glen Ridge, N.J. He was one of three children of Robert Dold, an architect, and Margaret (Noll) Dold.
He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., earning a bachelor’s degree in 1977 and a master’s degree in journalism in 1978.
The same year, he was hired to work on the suburban edition of The Tribune, covering the Chicago suburb of Skokie, and met his wife, Eileen Norris, a young reporter covering nearby Schaumburg. They married in 1982.
In addition to his daughters, she survives him, along with two sisters, Catherine Dold and Lisa Aramony, and five grandchildren.
In 2016, Mr. Dold was named editor in chief of The Tribune. He added the title of publisher soon after, during a newsroom overhaul by a new chairman of Tribune Publishing, which had been spun off from its corporate parent, the Tribune Company.
The dual publisher-editor title came amid ongoing turmoil in the industry, as revenue from advertising and print subscribers evaporated, with readers increasingly getting their news from screens.
In 2018, the paper vacated its landmark neo-Gothic headquarters, Tribune Tower, in downtown Chicago.
The next year, alarm swept through the newsroom when Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund with a reputation for buying newspapers and stripping them for parts, became Tribune Publishing’s largest shareholder. Vanity Fair called the hedge fund the “grim reaper of American newspapers.”
Mr. Dold was pushed out by the new ownership in 2020, along with Mr. Kendall, the managing editor, and Mr. McCormick, of the editorial board. But there were no mass layoffs at The Tribune, as there have been at some papers Alden bought.
It remains a robust newspaper, and Rick Kogan, a Tribune columnist, said that was partly Mr. Dold’s legacy. He instilled in young reporters — many of them shocked by the volatility in the business — that while the way people get the news was changing, the mission of journalism was not.
“He was very inspiring in that way,” Mr. Kogan said. “There are youngsters at the paper who, had Bruce not been leading the ship, might have looked for something else to do.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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