Allan M. Siegal, a former assistant managing editor of The New York Times who left a deep imprint on the newspaper's policies and practices for 30 years, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He passed away at the age of 22.
His wife said that he died. He had dealt with heart issues for a long time.
Mr. Siegal, who began his career at The Times as a copy boy in 1960, was revered and feared in the newsroom. Though never the face of The Times, he was something like its collective conscience, the ultimate institutionalist who was often called on to codify folkways.
In the late 1990s, he did it with William G. Connolly, who was a senior editor at the paper at the time. The New York Times manual of style and usage was edited by two people.
One of Mr. Siegal's favorite injunctions was "Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don't"
Being fair is more important than being first.
Mr. Siegal knew a lot of things. He was the most authoritative on the subject.
It seemed that Al knew everything about The Times. He started the paper at the age of 19 or 20.
Early in his Times career, Mr. Siegal was involved in the news report.
He was part of the team that edited the Times's landmark report of the secret government study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. He was in charge of the news operation for the national edition of The Times in 1980.
In the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter led to the fall of the top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper's ethical and organizational practices.
The creation of a new job was one of the recommendations. Mr. Siegal held the assistant managing editor position from 1987 to 2006 and was the first to be named to the position. His name was listed among the paper's top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page more than anyone else's.
Mr. Siegal was promoted to assistant managing editor by the executive editor.
Thelevating him was meant to serve notice that there is a career for non-reporters at The Times. He was superbly qualified and it was a strange form of affirmative action.
He used to be called Pooh-Bah. He had seven or eight portfolios that dominated every aspect of the production of The Times, the output of news, and all the rules and regulations, and drawers full of contracts with the business side as to how much space we got, and how we filled it. The paper was designed by him.
He was unwilling to buck the chain of command.
"Al's knowledge of current affairs and of broad journalistic ethics was always right up there with anyone's." He said that he wasn't one to suggest that the emperor had no clothes.
Mr. Siegal was able to make a lot of noise. He used a green felt-tip pen to write his post-mortem critique to the reporters and editors. Please? Both names andAbsurd were used.
He wanted the headline to be written by pedants from Mars, so he demanded that it combine several complex elements in a short word count.
Generations of editors and reporters were guided in the fine points of style and tone by his rockets. His not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. He used to say, "Nice, who?" when he thought a headline or caption was particularly artful. The name of the editor would appear to the editor's great pride in the next day's collection of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine.
There was a sense of humor. He once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to "fois gras" and said we should stick to chopped liver. The football coach Mike Ditka should recover from a heart attack unless God returns our call.
Bill Keller, the former Times executive editor, said that he was a man of integrity, but he was also a house disciplinarian.
Mr. Keller said that when he entered the hospital to have his heart worked on, he joked to a couple of people that they wouldn't know he had a heart.
Allan Marshall Siegal was born in the Bronx in 1940. Allan's father ran a delivery company for a while and Allan would help deliver bottles to customers in the area. Allan worked as a handyman in Irving's buildings. His mother was a stay at home mom.
Allan was the editor of the school newspaper when he was a student at Christopher Columbus High School.
He was offered a scholarship by New York University and was offered a job at The Times. He began in September of 1960.
He joined the foreign desk as a copy editor in 1963, and was promoted to assistant foreign editor in 1971 after a brief stint at ABC News.
The Times set up a secret newsroom in a New York hotel because it was so worried about the government finding out about the documents and trying to seize them before they were published. He brought rubber duckies to break the tension.
He was a reporter for The Times in 1974 and also worked at ABC. His work was well received by his editors. The article stated that Mrs. Thomas arrived at her daughter's kindergarten the mother of three and left the mother of four.
The senior editors at the paper had all been reporters. He returned to editing after finding writing painful.
He was named news editor of the paper in 1977 and was responsible for the design and editing of the front page. In 1987, he was promoted to assistant managing editor.
The Times changed its policy on publishing announcements of same-sex unions in its society pages after Mr. Siegal was named to head a standards committee. The paper declared in August that it would start publishing reports of same-sex commitment ceremonies and of some types of formal registration of gay and lesbian partnerships.
Mr and Ms. Leefmans were married in 1977. He lost a lot of weight before his daughter was born. He wanted to be able to hold the baby on his lap if he were to have a baby. He regained a lot of the weight.
He is survived by his family, including Ms. Leefmans.
Even the listing of survivors in an obituary was not spared the attention of Mr. Siegal.
In the Times stylebook he co-edited in the 1990s, there is a suggestion to list survivors at the end of an obituary. A full one will go to the basics earlier and end with an anecdote.
Mr. Siegal summed up his views about newspaper style in the introduction to the stylebook that he helped to assemble, though he didn't intend on doing that.
He wrote that the best of style depends on reporters' ears and eyesight. In that setting, the sudden appearance of an unusual word, a syncopation or a deviation in logic lets the reader know that there is more to this than just a bulletin.
Alex was a contributor.
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