Print, TV Reporter Edith Schapiro Dies at 80

By: E&P Staff Newspaper editor and pioneering female television news reporter Edith Schapiro died Jan. 7. She was 80.

With a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Schapiro spent several years at the old Newark (N.J.) Evening News, first as a reporter, later as society editor, and eventually as literary and drama critic.

After graduating with highest honors from Rutgers University's Douglass College, Schapiro began working at CBS television with the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Dallas Townsend and Don Hewitt. Her job as an on-air reporter came while at Columbia, which helped produce in New York's Channel 11 newscast.

While raising three children and in the years after, Schapiro kept a hand in journalism according to an obituary in The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J. She wrote columns for several local weeklies, started and edited magazines for her synagogues, edited several Jewish newspapers and wrote a column for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. In later years she and her husband launched the non-profit Sullivan-Ulster Jewish Star, in New York State.

Schapiro also worked as a publicist for civic and charitable organizations, and she wrote and produced a television commercial for Red Cross efforts to unite families separated by war and natural disaster.