AP’s first female international editor

Sally Jacobsen, a widely experienced Associated Press correspondent who became the first woman to serve as the news service’s international editor, overseeing with a cool, steady hand coverage of wars, terrorism and a daily stream of history-making events, has died at the age of 70.

Ms. Jacobsen, who retired in 2015 to Croton-onHudson, N.Y., died Thursday night at a nearby hospital from a recurrence of cancer that first struck her six years ago, said her husband, Patrick Oster, a retired Bloomberg News managing editor.

Her 39-year career took her from the precincts of financial power as a Washington economics correspondent,to the earthquakeravaged barrios of Mexico City, to the councils of NATO in Brussels and then to the pressure-packed job at New York City headquarters of leading AP’s scores of international correspondentsthrough the years of 9/ 11 and the invasions of Afghanistanand Iraq.

In her final jobs, she supervised the AP Stylebook, shepherding through changes in newswriting conventions followed by media organizations everywhere, and was executive director of the industry group Associated Press Media Editors.

A native of Gunnison, Colo., Ms. Jacobsen was a graduate of Iowa State University and Cornell University, where she received a master’s degree in economics. She joined the AP in its Baltimore bureau in 1976, and in 1979 transferred to the wire service’s Washington staff as an economics correspondent, in the days of energy crisis, double-digit inflation and rising U.S. unemployment.

She was assigned in 1985 as a Latin American business-economics correspondent in Mexico City, where she also helped report on such major stories as the massive 1985 earthquake in the Mexican capital. Three years later, she was transferred to Europe as AP Brussels correspondent, covering the NATO alliance, the formation of the European Union under the Maastricht Treaty, and the upheavals of thefinal Cold War years.

After a leave during which she taught journalism at California State University, Bakersfield, Ms. Jacobsen returned to AP in New York in 1996 as an assistant editor on the Business News desk, and then, two years later, to world news, as AP assistant international editor.

In 1999, she was promoted to international editor, a tough, prestigious AP position that for generations had beenheld only by men.