‘Reporter’ founding editor sought adventure in Santa Fe
McCord was up for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for editorials
Richard McCord, a weekly newspaper editor who lost a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when the judges’ decision inexplicably was overturned, died Wednesday at Santa Fe Care Center. He was 79.
McCord had been in declining health in recent weeks. The cause of death might have been a heart attack, said his former wife, Laurie Knowles. Like many gifted writers, McCord got his start elsewhere but made his way to Santa Fe in search of adventure.
He grew up a precocious student in the Atlanta area, and edited his college newspaper at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tenn.
McCord’s first job after college was as a reporter at Newsday on Long Island. It was a destination paper for many. Not for McCord.
He had reached the big leagues of journalism, but it was a place too large in another respect. McCord once said he never received a call from a reader reacting to one of his stories.
Countless young reporters aspired to work for a city daily. McCord cut against the grain. He wanted a smaller pond. In 1971, with Knowles working at
Women’s Wear Daily and McCord in his fourth year at Newsday, they gambled everything. They quit their jobs to explore the West. Neither had so much as a job interview lined up, much less the prospect of employment.
They arrived in Santa Fe, camping out until the snow fell. Living outdoors in those early months, McCord wrote freelance stories on a typewriter. He and Knowles moved to Albuquerque for about a year, when Knowles landed a job on the old Albuquerque Tribune.
But they wanted to return to Santa Fe and McCord had an inspiration. He began looking for people who would help finance a weekly newspaper he intended to start.
Neither McCord nor Knowles knew anything about the business side of a newspaper, but enthusiasm can overcome good sense. They began publishing the
Santa Fe Reporter in 1974.
With McCord as editor and co-publisher, the Reporter took off. He found and nurtured top talent. Many of his reporters would go on to work for metro dailies.
The benefits of learning from a wordsmith such as McCord didn’t include ease in paying the bills. McCord’s reporters made $100 a week. He paid himself $25 more.
McCord wrote editorials when time permitted and a topic captured his interest. He produced a string of memorable pieces in 1981.
When a pack of Santa Fe residents drove Buddhists from the Arroyo Hondo neighborhood, McCord’s headline jabbed the offenders: “Recognize it? It’s called bigotry.”
He supported a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. when the idea wasn’t so popular.
“This tough little Southern preacher, with his dream, his passion and his eloquence, and his ability to ignite the hopes of millions, is arguably the greatest man this nation has produced this century,” McCord wrote.
His idol was Ernie Pyle, the great correspondent of World War II. McCord even named his dog Ernie Pyle. The black mixed Labrador, adopted from a shelter, spent almost as much time in the
Reporter office as the editor. Riding his hot streak, McCord submitted his editorials for a 1982 Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s most prestigious award.
Four of the five Pulitzer judges voted to award the prize to McCord. The weekly editor who still wrote on a typewriter had made quite an impression.
But the Pulitzer board overruled the judges and instead gave the prize to Jack Rosenthal of the New York Times.
Had McCord won the Pulitzer, he said in a 2015 interview, he probably would have run the Reporter until he retired. Instead, after 15 years of paying himself sweatshop wages, he sold the paper.
McCord wrote columns and books after that. One of his books traced the life and death of the College of Santa Fe. Another unearthed the cutthroat business practices of the newspaper chain Gannett.
McCord continued to follow the Pulitzer awards. Two years after he came so close to winning, the Pulitzer for editorial writing went to Albert Scardino, editor of a weekly in Savannah, Ga.
It wasn’t so satisfying as winning himself would have been, McCord said in the 2015 interview. But it appeared he had gotten the Pulitzer board’s attention.