Richard J. Meislin, Times Editor and Web Journalism Pioneer, Dies at 68

Richard Jon Meislin was born in Manhattan on March 21, 1953, and raised in Allentown, Pa. His father, Nathan Meislin, was the president of Fountain Hill Mills, a family-owned knitwear manufacturer. His mother, Eleanor (Honigsberg) Meislin, was a homemaker.

In addition to Dr. Uyttendaele, he is survived by a sister, Carol Springer.

At Harvard, Mr. Meislin was president of The Harvard Crimson, the independent daily newspaper run by students. He applied to The Washington Post for a job after graduating in 1975 but was rejected for lack of experience.

The Times hired him as a copy boy; his job was to shuttle paper from one place in the blocklong newsroom to another. He was also a clerk to the managing editor, A.M. Rosenthal.

Mr. Meislin quickly fell into digital reporting. He programmed computers for the first New York Times/CBS News election survey in 1976, when terminals were linked through telephone handsets and data was displayed on sheets of perforated green-and-white paper.

“When everything works, it’s magical,” Mr. Meislin wrote for the March-April 1976 issue of The Times’s house organ, Times Talk. “The machine can zip through a mass of questionnaires, analyze them in depth, and give back the results in only a few minutes.”

He joined the metropolitan desk that year, rising to chief of the Albany bureau. He was made a foreign correspondent in 1982, responsible for Central America and the Caribbean. He took charge of the Mexico City bureau in 1983 and stayed until late 1985, when he was abruptly recalled to New York by Mr. Rosenthal, who by then was the executive editor.

“No one ever said, ‘You are being brought back from Mexico because you’re gay,’” Mr. Meislin said in an interview with Edward Alwood for the book “Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media” (1996). “But there was certainly a widespread belief in the newsroom that it was a factor — and not a small one.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/business/media/richard-j-meislin-editor.html