By: The Associated Press and E&P Staff Gerald Boyd, the former managing editor of The New York Times who was forced to resign amid the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, has died. He was 56.
His wife, Robin Stone, says Boyd was diagnosed with lung cancer in February and has been sick for most of the year. Boyd had kept his illness from most friends and colleagues.
Boyd was the first black journalist to work the many jobs he'd held at The Times, including metropolitan editor and managing editor.
And at 28, he was also the youngest journalist chosen for a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard.
Boyd and executive editor Howell Raines were brought down by the scandal caused by the journalist they had groomed, and by criticism of their management style.
Boyd resigned in 2003. He later became a syndicated a columnist.
"Every wife would say she?d want her husband to be known as a great person, wonderful husband, father and good citizen," said Robin Stone. "But as I?ve said before, as a journalist, he was my hero; and I know he was a hero to many journalists in the profession."
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, called Boyd a friend and colleague. "He was one of us," Keller said in an e-mail to Times staff.
As deputy managing editor for news, he oversaw the 2000 series "How Race is Lived in America," which won a Pulitzer Prize.
A native of St. Louis, he joined the Times in 1983 after serving as White House correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In his unpublished memoir, the Times reveals in its obituary on Friday, he wrote, ?I learned to survive by learning to rely on no one other than myself. Over time, I would travel further and rise further than I could ever have imagined as a child growing up poor in St. Louis. I would become as familiar with the powerful as I had always been with the powerless.?
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