Richard Severo, Times Reporter in Internal Clash Over Book, dies at age 90

Richard Severo, an award-winning reporter for The New York Times whose challenge of what he viewed as a sentencing transfer by the newspaper’s management became a cause célèbre among journalists in the 1980s, died June 12 at his home in Balmville, NY, in the Hudson Valley. He was 90.

His wife, Emóke Edith de Papp, said the cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Throughout his Times career, from 1968 to 2006, Mr. Severo won a coveted George Polk Award from Long Island University in 1975 for reporting that millions of gallons of milk were produced by a New York State dairy cooperative, one of the largest in the nation, had been diluted with skim milk powder for more than five years while being sold as whole milk. He also won a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from Columbia University for a report on an unmarried mother and the death of her child in 1977, and three Page One Awards from his union, the NewsGuild of New York.

But while reporting for the science section of The Times, Mr Severo clashed with his bosses when he decided to write a book based on his articles about a patient with neurofibromatosis – known as the “Elephant Man” disease – whose face was reconfigured after grueling surgery. .

Accounts of what happened next vary, but The Times, through its subsidiary Times Books, is said to have claimed first rights to the book because it was based on Mr Severo’s work for the paper. However, Mr. Severo, through his agent, had already started auctioning the rights to other publishers. Times Books eventually bid $37,500 (about $110,000 in today’s dollars), but Harper & Row won the rights with a bid of $50,000 (about $145,000).

The book, published in 1985 as “Lisa H: The True Story of an Extraordinary and Courageous Woman”, was described in The New York Times Book Review as “a sharp account”. But by then, Mr. Severo had been transferred to the capital bar, which he viewed as a demotion and retaliation for the book deal. Top editors at The Times said the move was because they had had enough of his constant complaining; Mr. Severo was known as a perfectionist, uncompromising and cantankerous.

The incident provoked an unusual public confrontation over a company’s prerogative to transfer an employee and the extent to which a news organization can claim ownership of a reporter’s articles if the reporter decides to write a book based on that work. The conflict was discussed not only in the news industry, but also outside it.

“Seldom at the pinnacle of journalism does a conflict between a reporter and his boss become as bitter and public as Richard Severo’s case against The New York Times,” wrote Eleanor Randolph in The Washington Post in 1984.

The boss was AM Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief, who was believed to be similar in temperament to Mr. Severo.

Four years of arbitration hearings followed, during which Mr. Severo took unpaid leave. Gradually, an internal revolt arose by a cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners when management demanded that Mr. Severo hand over his diaries and other personal papers. Finally, in September 1988, an arbitrator ruled in favor of The Times.

When he ended his leave, Mr. Severo returned and accepted the transfer to the metropolitan bar. He was later assigned to the obituary desk where he prepared many in-depth celebrity obituaries prior to their deaths.

(Under current Times policy, as set out in its “Ethical Journalism” handbook, the company requires staff who intend to write a non-fiction book based on their work for The Times to notify The Times in advance and refraining from accepting an offer from an outside publisher until The Times decides whether to make a competitive offer for the book.)

As a Times reporter earlier in his career, Mr. Severo went undercover in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx for four months to cover the heroin trade and its impact. In 1977, he wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine revealing that the nation’s first nuclear waste reprocessing plant was leaking nuclear waste into Lake Erie. And in 1979, he described the impact of the weed killer Agent Orange on US troops returning from Vietnam.

While on leave from the arbitration hearings, he wrote “The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home: From Valley Forge to Vietnam” (1989), with Lewis Milford.

In his memoir “City Room” (2003), Arthur Gelb, a former metropolitan editor and editor-in-chief at The Times, called Mr. Severo “one of the most courageous reporters on my staff”.

Thomas Richard Severo, who was known as Dick, was born on November 22, 1932, in Newburgh, NY, to Thomas and Mary Theresa (Farina) Severo, Italian immigrants. His father owned a liquor store and his mother was a housewife.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in history from Colgate University in 1954, Mr. Severo hired as a news assistant at CBS. He continued with a series of reports at The Poughkeepsie New Yorker, a now-closed Hudson Valley newspaper; The Associated Press in Newark, NJ; The New York Herald Tribune; and The Washington Post before The Times recruited him in 1968.

His wife, known as Mokey, is his only direct survivor.