Elizabeth Pochoda, journalist who crosses the New York Media World, dies at 83

Elizabeth Pochoda, a journalist who widely crossed, edited and writing for publications as diverse as the Nation, Vogue and The Daily News in New York during her 50-year career of New York, died in her home in Brooklyn on 8 May. She was 83.

Her death, of complications of amyotrophe lateral sclerosis, or as, was confirmed by her daughter, the novelist Ivy Pochoda.

Mrs. Pochoda (pronounced as PAH-CO-DA), known as Betsy, worked for fashion magazines (Mirabella and Vogue) and Shelter Magazines (House & Garden). She worked in the public interest publications (she was part of the team that again launched the Vanity Fair in the early 1980s) and at niche publications (the magazine Antiques).

And she worked in publications with grimly different readers, including the Progressive Magazine The Nation-from which she decamped for a while to find the August Literary Magazine Grand Street together together, The New York Post and The Daily News.

Not that Mrs. Pochoda was patient with the distinction between readers. “I don’t believe in different eyebrows – high, low, middle,” she told Chicago Reader in 1993. “I believe that if you write about things with the right excitement, they are accessible to everyone.”

“Betsy just had an incredibly broad vision, whether in the antique world, the political world or the art world,” said Eleanor Gustafson, an advisory editor at Antiques, who was the executive editor of the magazine during the anniversary of Mrs. Pochoda as an editor in Chief of 2009 to 2016.

To transform antiques into a little less, well, antiques and more attractive for a wider audience, Mrs. Pochoda Ted Muehling, a designer of jewelry and decorative objects, asked to go to the Shelburne Museum, in Vermont, to go into Vermont, chooses an object that resonated with him in the extensive collection of Americana, and over it. Toots Zynsky, a glass artist, undertook a similar mission in the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass., Who focuses on Asian, Indian and folk art.

“She was a brilliant editor and enormously creative,” said Dominique Browning, who took Mrs. Pochoda when she moved from the top of the Masthead in Mirabella to the top lock in House & Garden in the mid -1990s.

“She was very smart in connecting writers with topics: she had Michael Pollan write about photo players,” continued Mrs. Browning, referring to the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (2006).

Mrs. Pochoda, who “had a very idiosyncratic sensitivity,” said Mrs. Browning, commissioned the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien To write about her fax machine and the novel writer and essayist Cynthia Ozick to write about ladles.

She also supported writers in the ways that perhaps made up the most: financially and typographically.

“She called me cold and told me she wanted me to write for the nation, but ashamed because the costs there were so low,” said the jazz critic and writer Gary Giddins in an interview. But once she was on Vanity Fair, he added: “She wanted to give me a contract.”

Then, as a possible subject, Mr. Giddins suggested Biréli LagrèneA teen -French jazz guitarist who recently recorded his first album, ‘Betsy told her boss:’ Gary is the only person who can do this. We have to send him to Salzburg to do the interview, “said Mr. Giddins. “And then Betsy told me:” You can’t just go to Salzburg. While you are there, you to have To also go to Vienna. “She was an enthusiastic who protected her writers. ‘

Katrine Ames, a writer and editor who was at the house and garden staff with Mrs. Pochoda and who later wrote for her with Antiques, remembered an assignment to profile Ulysses Grant Dietz, then the main curator in the Newark Museum. “I told Betsy that it was far over the length she had asked for, but there was such great information and I told her that I would crop it,” said Mrs. Ames in an interview. “And she said,” No, I’m not going to cut a word. I’m just going to place it in a smaller print. “

The youngest of three children, Elizabeth Jane Turner, was born on December 13, 1941 in Chicago. Her father, Frederick, was a lawyer; Her mother, Frances (Franklin) Turner, managed the household.

After deserving a BA in English literature at Connecticut College, she went a Ph.D. In medieval literature of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. In the same year, she married Philip Pochoda, a university teacher of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who later became editor and book publisher.

Mrs. Pochoda was a professor of English literature at Temple University when she was offered the task of literary editor for the nation in 1976 based on a recommendation from Philip Roth.

“I had written a review of his comic fantasy ‘The Breast’ and we met for drinks in Philadelphia after his class at the University of Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Pochoda remembered in a tribute to Mr Roth in the nation after his dead In 2018. “I was a young academic and I told him that I wanted, that term of office was the worst that could happen to me.”

“Betsy found journalism exciting,” said Mr. Pochoda in an interview. “We were both active in the anti -war movement, and Betsy was very outfacing about her beliefs and her cultural politics. The nation was a much better fitting than a life of the academic world.”

As the book and art editor of the nation, Mrs. Pochoda wanted to accept the emerging tide of Cant – she loved critics of received opinion, “said Katrina Vanden Heuvel, then the editor of the magazine and now the editor and publisher, said in an interview.

“She wanted to take the big books, the books about the bestseller lists,” she said and added: “She wasn’t serious. Betsy hated serious. But she was tough. She was steel.”

Mrs. Pochoda was just as sharp and witty a writer as many of those she edited. “Here is a remarkable moment in the annals of American literary fetishism,” she wrote in a 2019 column for the nation about the auction of Mr Roth’s personal effects, causing the mild interest in the “Sandy Koufax Baseball Card and a heavily demolished Pat and Dick Nixon Souvenir plate”.

They were, she noticed, “the leaves of a man who is known for the advice of Flaubert van Heart Flaubert that writers should live modest if they want to be wild and original in their work.”

Mrs. Pochoda’s marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, Ivy, she is survived by a granddaughter and a brother, Frederick W. Turner.

“My huge mother passed this morning after a short battle with ALS,” wrote Mrs. Pochoda on Thursday in an Instagram post. “Because she is not around to edit this message, it is filled with commonplaces. She would probably ask me to revise and submit it again.”