John Geddes, who as a savvy and convivial managing editor of The New York Times oversaw production of the daily print newspaper and the newsroom’s turbulent transition into a digital operation, died on Tuesday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 74.
The cause was lung disease linked to the medication he was taking for rheumatoid arthritis, said his wife, Jyll Holzman, a former senior vice president for advertising at The Times.
After working for 13 years at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a correspondent and an editor in Germany and the national editor in New York, Mr. Geddes (pronounced GED-iss) joined The Times in 1994 as its business editor.
In 1997, a year after The Times officially established nytimes.com, he was named deputy managing editor and in 2003 was appointed managing editor for news operations.
He was responsible for production, budgeting and staffing as the newspaper coped with declining print advertising and circulation while embracing a robust online presence.
Bill Keller, the executive editor who designated Mr. Geddes as one of two managing editors (the other, Jill Abramson, for news gathering), the second-highest position in the newsroom, praised him at the time for “his shrewd guidance, his unfailing good humor and his mastery of just about everything.”
“John is the only person I know who could put out the entire New York Times by himself,” Mr. Keller said.
In 2011, when The Times imposed a paywall on its website that required a paid subscription, Mr. Geddes’s role as a senior newsroom manager was expanded by Ms. Abramson, then the executive editor, to identify and develop new digital endeavors in conjunction with The Times’s business executives.
“We desperately needed his humor and strength during the bumpy transition to becoming a global, digital newsroom,” she said in an interview. “John was a steady leader of that passage, which involved painful layoffs and other cuts before the paid subscription plan saved us.”
Dean Baquet, who succeeded Ms. Abramson as executive editor, described Mr. Geddes as “a terrific journalist, an editor who understood the businesses we covered and the business we actually were in.”
“It made him invaluable,” Mr. Baquet said. “He was like a math major in a sea of English majors.”
By the time Mr. Geddes retired from The Times in 2013, he had served under four executive editors.
John Martin Geddes was born on Nov. 19, 1951, in Providence, R.I. His father, Thomas, was an accountant who became the treasurer of Rhode Island College. His mother, Gertrude (Carroll) Geddes, taught in an elementary school.
He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Rhode Island in 1974 and a master’s in business journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976.
“I got into this profession partly because I wanted a job without repetition, a chance to deal with something new each day,” he recalled in 2013.
He was a reporter for The Ansonia Evening Sentinel in Connecticut, covered business news for The Times from Germany in the late 1970s and reported for the Associated Press-Dow Jones News Service before joining The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 13 years. He was Bonn bureau chief, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal/Europe and assistant managing editor and national editor of the parent paper.
Before returning to The Times, he was chief executive of BIS Strategic Decisions, a market research company that was acquired by his previous employer, Friday Holdings, an investment partnership.
After he left The Times in 2013, Mr. Geddes was managing editor for Bloomberg Politics, directing the news service’s 2016 election coverage. He was a Shorenstein fellow in 2014 at the Harvard Kennedy School.
In addition to Ms. Holzman, he is survived by two children, Christine and Alex Geddes, from his first marriage in 1992 to Erika Wilksen, which ended in divorce; two sisters, Maggie Geddes and Mary Geddes; a brother, Pete Geddes; and a grandson.
He remained optimistic about his chosen profession, he told Times readers in 2009, because “people who make money by knowing what’s going on will pay money to get accurate information.”
He also spoke often of The Times’s role in journalism, even if staff members rarely invoked its reputation as the paper of record.
“No one I queried nailed a plausible ambition for The Times more accurately than managing editor John Geddes,” Daniel Okrent, the paper’s first public editor, wrote in 2004.
According to Mr. Okrent, Mr. Geddes said: “I don’t think there can be a ‘paper of record.’ The term implies an omniscient chronicler of events, an arbiter that perfectly captures the significance and import of a day in our lives.”
“I don’t work at that place,” Mr. Geddes continued. “I work at a newspaper that exists in a world where there are constraints of time, resources and knowledge. The wonder of the paper is that knowing the everyday limits to our ambitions doesn’t prevent us from trying to exceed them.”
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