Diana McLellan, who dished Washington gossip with verve, dies at 76

Diana Blanche Dicken was born Sept. 22, 1937, in Leicester, England. Her father was a British military officer who became a defense attache in Washington in 1957, and she accompanied him to the city.

Her first marriage, to Robin Bull, ended in divorce. In 1963, she wed Richard X. McLellan Jr. Besides her husband, of Easton, Md., survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, Fiona Weeks of Easton, Md.; a sister; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mrs. McLellan died at her daughter’s home of cancer, said her daughter.

In her post-column years, Mrs. McLellan wrote for magazines such as Washingtonian and Ladies’ Home Journal. Her books included “Ear on Washington” (1982), “The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood” (2000), which explored the lesbian scene in the film capital during the 1930s and ’40s, and “Making Hay” (2012), a poetry collection.

Mrs. McLellan once offered advice for those hoping to stay out of the news: Do whatever you want in August.

“August is when congressmen go away and drop one wife and marry another, when people build additions to their houses that other people don’t want built, when shops in Georgetown turn into porno shops,” she once told the reference guide Contemporary Authors.

“It is sort of the Mardi Gras of Washington,” she added, “when everybody gets away with everything. The Senate is out, the House is out, the Supreme Court is out, and the White House people are usually away. So the gossip columnists go away too.”

Diana McLellan,who died June 25 at 76, was a self-described “jolly pariah” whose Washington gossip column the Ear became a puckish, first-read chronicle of social news and intrigue in the 1970s and 1980s.

She mock-lamented the foibles of public officials (“Where are standards?”). She detailed who was going “wok shopping” (getting married) or “expecting more than the mailman” (pregnant).

She coyly alluded to extramarital dalliances sometimes under the very nose (or coats) of chic partygoers. “It is very poor form in Washington,” she wrote, “to use your host’s bed for any purpose other than storing outer clothing.”

Washington — the city where hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth popularized the quip, “If you haven’t anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me” — has long been a free-trade zone of rumor. In the 1960s, The Washington Post’s Maxine Cheshire brought an investigative zeal to the gossip trade, while the Washington Star’s genteel Betty Beale scouted human-interest items in the lives of the black tie and champagne set.

Into this mix came the British-born McLellan, who wrote gossip in the 1970s and 1980s, first for the Star, then for The Post (where she narrowly avoided libel action from President Jimmy Carter) and finally at the Washington Times.

Chuck Conconi, a former editor at Washingtonian magazine who for seven years wrote a gossip and celebrity column in The Post, described Mrs. McLellan as “the best of any of us. She wrote a smart, sassy little column that had this effervescence of British humor.”

Attribution: BY ADAM BERNSTEIN, WashingtonPost.com
Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/diana-mclellan-washington-gossip-columnist-dies-at-76/2014/06/26/ccb680bc-faff-11e3-932c-0a55b81f48ce_story.html

Newspaper editor C. David Burgin dies at 75

C. David Burgin, a longtime editor who gained a reputation as a troubleshooter for fading newspapers, died Monday at his home in Houston after a lengthy illness. He was 75.

Burgin died of the effects of four serious strokes he had suffered since 1997, said his wife, Judy Burgin.

Burgin had served as editor-in-chief of seven U.S. daily newspapers, starting with New Jersey’s Paterson News in 1977.

His first top management jobs came at The Washington Star, where he rose through the ranks of sports editor and city editor to assistant managing editor and hired such young talent as future New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and sportswriter Ira Berkow. He talked two Washington bartenders, future Boston Globe business writer Chris Reidy and future Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Daley, into trying newspaper work.

After getting his first assignment of running a newspaper in 1977, as editor-in-chief of the Paterson News in New Jersey, The Tribune Co. hired him a year later to merge two of its San Francisco Bay area dailies into the Peninsula Times Tribune, then later sent him to improve and expand the Orlando Sentinel.

In 1985, Hearst Newspapers hired Burgin to revive the fading fortunes of its flagship San Francisco Examiner. In a 1996 profile published in the alternative publication SF Weekly, Burgin said he was fired seven months later after spurning an invitation to meet with the Hearst Corp. board.

After doing consulting work for a year, Burgin took the offer of former Washington Star colleague William Dean Singleton to be editor-in-chief of the Dallas Times Herald, which Singleton had just bought from the Times Mirror Corp. From 1986 to 1990, Burgin worked to try to save two Singleton dailies from extinction, running the Dallas daily for two years before the owner of its crosstown rival, The Dallas Morning News, bought and folded it.

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/newspaper-editor-c-david-burgin-dies-at-75/2014/06/16/712be048-f5cd-11e3-930d-ca5db8eb8323_story.html
Attribution: AP

C-SPAN Videos: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/davidburgin

C. David Burgin, a newspaper legend who served stints as editor of three Bay Area newspapers, died Monday at his home in Houston from the effects of a series of strokes. He was 75.

Mr. Burgin worked his way up from part-time reporter to editor at posts all over the country. He served as editor in chief of seven different American papers, possibly a record. Among the papers he ran were the San Francisco Examiner, where he served as editor in chief twice, the Peninsula Times Tribune and the Alameda Newspaper Group, which published six Bay Area papers, including the Oakland Tribune.

Full story: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/C-David-Burgin-editor-of-S-F-Examiner-twice-5559764.php
Attribution: Carl Nolte - SFGate