Newsday managing editor Robert F. Brandt - December 28, 2018

In an often hard-charging newsroom world, Newsday managing editor Robert F. Brandt excelled with brilliant editing, unflappable calm, even when catastrophic events erupted around the world, while always taking care of his colleagues.

“As the night managing editor, Bob had tremendous impact; ultimately, he decided what got into the paper, and what didn’t, and how much attention a story should receive,” said Howard Schneider, a former Newsday editor and founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University.

Brandt, who died Friday in a Maryland hospice at age 72, completely redid the paper the night TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, his former colleagues recalled, killing all 230 passengers on July 17, 1996.

When he retired after serving more than 15 years as managing editor, Brandt said he was proud of his role in converting Newsday from an afternoon to a morning newspaper, in the mid-1980s when afternoon papers were struggling. He also advanced Newsday’s efforts to hire more minority staff members.

Before joining Newsday in 1981, Brandt had worked at the Tampa Tribune, Hartford Courant, Miami Herald and Washington Star.

Attribution: Joan Gralla - newsday.com
Full Story: Brandt

Barry Kalb, Journalist & Teacher - December 19, 2018

It is with great sadness that we heard the news of the passing of Barry Kalb on Wednesday, 19 December 2018, at the age of 75.

Barry was a long-time lecturer at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) at The University of Hong Kong, spending close to a decade teaching the fundamentals of reporting and writing before retiring in 2014. He continued his association with HKU however, running regular English-language grammar boot camps for students.

A journalist with more than 30 years of experience, Barry started his career in journalism in 1967 at the Evening Star in Washington, D.C. After eight years, he moved to Hong Kong in 1975, briefly for NBC News, and then as a staff correspondent for CBS News. In 1979, he joined Time magazine as Eastern Europe bureau chief, based in West Berlin, and subsequently moved to Rome, New York and back to Hong Kong.

Barry took a 14-year break from journalism to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions in Hong Kong including running Il Mercato, a notable Italian restaurant in Central. In late 2002, he returned to journalism, as an editor at the Voice of America bureau in Hong Kong.

His career included coverage of many remarkable news events, including the Watergate corruption scandal in Washington, D.C., the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong and the return to power of Deng Xiaoping in China, the beginnings of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome, among many other stories.

Attribution: Cal Wong - https://jmsc.hku.hk
Full story> Kalb