William G. Connolly, editor who edited The Times, dies at 85

William G. Connolly, who during a long career as an editor at The New York Times raised journalistic standards, opened new opportunities to a more diverse range of employees, and applied that experience in a major overhaul of the venerable style of newspaper guide, died Tuesday in Maplewood, NJ. He was 85.

His daughter Kathleen confirmed the death. He was at a rehabilitation center recovering from a fall, she said.

After more than two decades at The Times — except for a few in the early 1980s, when he went to work at a Virginia newspaper — Mr. Connolly was elevated to a new senior position in 1987, directing training and recruitment.

In that role, he oversaw the paper’s ethical guidelines, brought in new faces from a broader pool of applicants and turned a critic’s eye to the paper’s daily output with a newsletter he took over called ‘Winners and Sinners’ .

He held his colleagues to high standards, but also entertained them with his dry humor and punctuation preferences; he especially liked the semicolon.

In short, it was a logical choice ten years later to take on the enormous task of editing the venerable ‘The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage’, which had been in use for decades, together with his friend and fellow editor Allan M. Siegal. use was to be revised. not only within the newspaper, but also by hundreds of other publications and countless student and non-professional writers.

But the book hadn’t been touched in decades, and its worn entries reflected a disappearing analog world dominated by white men.

From an unused radio studio in the newspaper’s old offices on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, Mr. Connolly and Mr. Siegal, an assistant editor, painstakingly went through and rewrote the thousands of articles in the manual, rewriting what was a slim volume expanded to 365 pages, organized from A to Z.

Rather than dictating the terms used to define a group of people, they ruled that the newspaper should use the words people preferred. They also put to rest a debate over whether it was ever acceptable to use certain racial slurs, even in a quote (no).

Mr Connolly was particularly annoyed by the old manual’s use of one English male name – John Manley – in all its examples. He replaced them with a long list of surnames, all meaning ‘Lamb’ in different languages: Cordero (Spanish), Agneau (French) and Kikondoo (Swahili), among others.

“He kept track of them on a spreadsheet,” Merrill Perlman, a former Times editor who assisted Mr. Connolly on the book, said in a telephone interview. “He didn’t want to overuse them.”

Mr. Manley, once ubiquitous in the manual, survived in only one place: the obituary entry.

William Gerard Connolly Jr. was born on October 12, 1937 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father worked for the U.S. Post Office and his mother, Loretto (Blewitt) Connolly, was a teacher.

He studied philosophy and English at the University of Scranton, graduating in 1959 and then entered the U.S. Army. He spent three years as a news announcer and disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio out of the New York City office.

He remained in New York and worked as a copy boy at The Times while studying for a master’s degree at Columbia University’s journalism school. After graduating in 1963, he worked short stints at a long list of newspapers — including The Minneapolis Tribune, The Houston Chronicle and The Detroit Free Press — before returning to The Times in 1966.

He married Clair Connor in 1964. She died in 2013. Along with their daughter, he is survived by his sons, William G. Connolly III; Harold Connolly; three grandchildren; and his sister, Sister Jane Marie Connolly.

Although he wrote a fair number of news articles, Mr. Connolly was primarily an editor, covering the foreign section, The New York Times Magazine, the real estate section and the metropolitan section. He was also the founding editor of the Science Times section.

He left in 1979 to become editor-in-chief of The Virginia Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1981 he started teaching at the Maynard Institutewhich hosted a summer program in Tucson, Arizona, that trained journalists of color for jobs as editors.

In the mid-1980s, The Times came under both public and internal criticism for its stiff editorial style and lack of diversity in its staff and reporting, and Mr. Connolly, with his special combination of management experience and insider awareness of the Times culture, was a logical candidate to turn that around.

He returned as assistant editor in the national bureau and then as deputy editor of The Week in Review section, although in both positions he was given the additional mission of helping open the paper to a broader group of employees.

After his promotion to senior management in 1987, he created the news department’s first management training program. And he brought in a new generation of editors, not only more racially diverse, but also with a greater variety of backgrounds and experiences.

His work with Mr. Siegal to revise the stylebook was his last major project at The Times before he retired in 2001, although he continued to consult on future revisions while retaining their names as authors.

“This guide reflects The Times’s impression of its educated and sophisticated readership – traditional but not tradition-bound,” they wrote in their introduction. “Everywhere the aim is a flowing style, easy to talk to but not jargon and only occasionally informal.”