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Richard Severo, a prizewinning reporter for The New York Times whose problem to what he thought-about a punitive switch by the newspaper’s administration grew to become a trigger célèbre amongst journalists within the Eighties, died on June 12 at his residence in Balmville, N.Y., within the Hudson Valley. He was 90.
His spouse, Emóke Edith de Papp, mentioned the trigger was problems of Parkinson’s illness.
Over his Times profession, from 1968 to 2006, Mr. Severo received a coveted George Polk Award from Lengthy Island College in 1975 for his reviews that thousands and thousands of gallons of milk produced by a New York State dairy farmers’ cooperative, one of many largest within the nation, had been watered down with powdered skim milk for greater than 5 years whereas being offered as complete milk. He additionally received a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from Columbia College for a report about an unwed mom and the loss of life of her little one in 1977, and three Web page One Awards from his union, the Newspaper Guild (now the NewsGuild) of New York.
However whereas reporting for The Times’s science part, Mr. Severo ran afoul of his bosses when he determined to put in writing a guide drawn from his articles a few affected person with neurofibromatosis — often called Elephant Man’s illness — whose face was reconfigured after grueling surgical procedure.
Accounts of what occurred subsequent range, however The Times, by means of its publishing subsidiary Times Books, was mentioned to have claimed first rights to the guide as a result of it was based mostly on Mr. Severo’s work for the newspaper. Mr. Severo, nonetheless, by means of his agent, had already begun auctioning the rights to different publishers. Times Books ultimately bid $37,500 (about $110,000 in at present’s {dollars}), however Harper & Row, with a suggestion of $50,000 (about $145,000), received the rights.
Printed in 1985 as “Lisa H: The True Story of an Extraordinary and Brave Girl,” the guide was described as “an incisive account” by Eric W. Schrier in The New York Times Book Evaluate. However by then Mr. Severo had been transferred to the metropolitan desk, which he thought-about a demotion and retaliation for the guide deal. High editors at The Times mentioned the transfer was as a result of that they had grow to be fed up together with his fixed complaining; Mr. Severo was recognized to be a perfectionist, uncompromising and cantankerous.
The incident set off an unusually public confrontation over an organization’s prerogative to switch an worker, and to what diploma a information group can declare possession of a reporter’s articles if the reporter decides to put in writing a guide based mostly on that work. The battle was lined not solely within the information business, however past.
“Seldom on the prime ranges of journalism does a battle between a reporter and his boss grow to be so bitter and public because the case of Richard Severo versus The New York Times,” Eleanor Randolph wrote in The Washington Post in 1984.
The boss was A.M. Rosenthal, the chief editor, who was thought-about to be comparable in temperament — mercurial, cussed, generally capricious — to Mr. Severo.
4 years of arbitration hearings ensued, throughout which Mr. Severo took an unpaid go away. Alongside the way in which an inside revolt was mounted by a cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners when administration demanded that Mr. Severo hand over his diaries and different private papers. In the long run, in September 1988, an arbitrator dominated in The Times’s favor.
Ending his go away, Mr. Severo returned and accepted the switch to the metropolitan desk. He was later assigned to the obituaries desk, the place he ready many in-depth obituaries about luminaries upfront of their deaths.
(Beneath present Times coverage, as outlined in its “Moral Journalism” handbook, the corporate requires workers members intending to put in writing a nonfiction guide based mostly on their work for The Times to inform The Times upfront, and to chorus from accepting a bid from an out of doors writer till The Times decides whether or not to make a aggressive supply for the guide.)
As a Times reporter earlier in his profession, Mr. Severo went undercover for 4 months within the Hunts Level part of the Bronx to report on the heroin commerce and its impression. In 1977, he wrote a canopy article for The New York Times Journal by which he revealed that the nation’s first nuclear waste reprocessing plant was leaking nuclear waste into Lake Erie. And in 1979, he detailed the impression of the herbicide Agent Orange on American troops getting back from Vietnam.
Throughout his go away of absence because the arbitration hearings went on, he wrote “The Wages of Conflict: When America’s Troopers Got here House — From Valley Forge to Vietnam” (1989), with Lewis Milford.
In his memoir “Metropolis Room” (2003), Arthur Gelb, a former metropolitan editor and managing editor at The Times, known as Mr. Severo “some of the gutsy reporters on my workers.”
Thomas Richard Severo, who was often called Dick, was born on Nov. 22, 1932, in Newburgh, N.Y., to Thomas and Mary Theresa (Farina) Severo, Italian immigrants. His father owned a liquor retailer, and his mom was a homemaker.
After incomes a bachelor’s diploma in historical past from Colgate College in 1954, Mr. Severo was employed as a information assistant at CBS. He went on to a sequence of reporting stints with The Poughkeepsie New Yorker, a now-closed Hudson Valley newspaper; The Related Press in Newark, N.J.; The New York Herald Tribune; and The Washington Submit, earlier than The Times recruited him in 1968.
His spouse, who is called Mokey, is his solely fast survivor.
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