Jerry Ceppos, former top editor of San Jose Mercury News, dies at 75

The cause of death was sepsis, said his wife, Karen Ceppos.

Mr. Ceppos devoted half a century to the practice and teaching of journalism, spending most of his career with Knight Ridder when it was the second-largest newspaper chain in the United States. He was an editor at the Miami Herald before joining the Mercury News in 1981, rising to the position of managing editor and then executive editor from 1995 to 1999.

“He was a really excellent editor who transformed the San Jose Mercury News from what I’ll call a respectable newspaper to, during his editorship, one of the 10 best newspapers in the country,” Bill Marimow, a former editor in chief of the Baltimore Sun and the Philadelphia Inquirer, said in an interview.

Mr. Ceppos later served as Knight Ridder’s corporate vice president for news, with a portfolio that included oversight of news operations at all the chain’s newspapers as well as its Washington bureau, from 1999 to 2005.

Mr. Ceppos’s tenure at the Mercury News coincided with the phenomenal early growth of the technology industry in Silicon Valley. He considered “the story of Silicon Valley … nothing less than Florence in the time of the Medicis,” journalist Michael Shapiro wrote in an article about the Mercury News published in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in 2011.

“When Jerry became Executive Editor, he understood how important covering the tech story was to the paper, including what was then the very beginning of Washington’s interest in tech,” Rory O’Connor, who served at the time as Washington correspondent for the Mercury News, wrote in an email. “Look at what’s happening today to see just how well he could see how important that story would become.”

Under Mr. Ceppos’s leadership, the Mercury News produced significant coverage in other areas, as well, winning two Pulitzer Prizes during his time as managing editor.

Three Mercury News reporters — Lewis M. Simons, Pete Carey and Katherine Ellison — received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for a series on the autocratic Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and his massive transfers of wealth abroad. The series was widely considered to have helped precipitate his ouster shortly thereafter.

The Mercury News staff later received a Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting recognizing its coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake on Oct. 17, 1989, which killed 63 people in the San Francisco Bay area.

He “really helped guide that coverage,” Susan Goldberg, the acting city editor at the time and later a successor to Mr. Ceppos as executive editor at the Mercury News, said in an interview. In a high-pressure, deadline-driven business that “sometimes isn’t known for the kindest people,” she added, he was a supportive presence who “helped people feel confident in themselves and in their own abilities.”

Mr. Ceppos later guided the Mercury News through an embarrassing episode following the publication in 1996 of a three-part investigative series dubbed “Dark Alliance,” which sought to link the CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States. The articles, written by reporter Gary Webb, implied the CIA knew that a drug ring with ties to anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels was peddling crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s and that the ring was directing millions of dollars in profits to the U.S.-backed “contras.”

Cocaine “was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices,” the report alleged. The online version of the story included a graphic in which the CIA insignia was superimposed over the image of a person smoking crack.

Years later, The Washington Post described the series as “the first major journalism cause celebre on the newly emerging Internet.” Some Black leaders pointed to the Mercury News reports to accuse the CIA of intentionally distributing crack cocaine in African American communities. Government investigations ensued.

Amid the furor, The Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published reports that cast doubt on elements of the Mercury News’s reporting. Reporters for The Post wrote that “the available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras — or Nicaraguans in general — played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States.”

Mr. Ceppos, who the CJR reported had been on medical leave, ultimately assigned an internal team of journalists to review the newspaper’s handling of the story.

“We oversimplified the complex issue of how the crack epidemic in America grew,” he wrote in an open letter to readers in 1997. “Through imprecise language and graphics, we created impressions that were open to misinterpretation.”

“I believe that we fell short at every step of our process in the writing, editing and production of our work,” he wrote. “Several people here share that burden. … But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine.”

Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, told The Post at the time that Mr. Ceppos’s column was “an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.”

“I give him high marks for openness and candor,” McManus said, “which is something newspapers don’t have a very good record of doing. We tend to bury our corrections in small type on page 2.”

“He was a deeply ethical person,” said Carey, an investigative reporter who worked under Mr. Ceppos on both Pulitzer-winning projects as well as on the internal review of Dark Alliance. Mr. Ceppos’s conduct, he said, was “characteristic of the way he was.”

Jerome Merle Ceppos was born in Washington on Oct. 14, 1946. His mother was a homemaker and later a real estate agent. His father had a bachelor’s degree in journalism but was unable to find a job in newspapering and made a living as the owner of a Jewish deli.

An uncle on Mr. Ceppos’s maternal side was Sidney Epstein, a journalist who became editor and associate publisher of the old Washington Star, the city’s afternoon newspaper.

Mr. Ceppos grew up in Silver Spring, Md., where he started a newspaper in elementary school and edited the newspaper at Northwood High. After his graduation in 1964, he enrolled at the University of Maryland. He edited the newspaper there, as well, and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1969.

After three years as a reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Ceppos moved to the Miami Herald in 1972. There, he did a stint as wire editor, with the task of monitoring the barrage of incoming national and international reports from wire services.

Clark Hoyt, a former public editor of the New York Times and vice president of news for Knight Ridder, recalled an encounter with Mr. Ceppos during those early years of their career. Hoyt, then working as Washington correspondent for the Herald, happened to be in the newsroom in Miami attending the story conference where editors hashed out which articles to place on the front page. On the front of an early edition of the paper was an article about an accident near Lake Okeechobee involving a bus that overturned, resulting in the drowning deaths of some of the migrant workers onboard.

An editor with what Hoyt described as a “volcanic temper” dismissed the account as a traffic incident of little interest to readers in Miami. It should not run on the front page, the editor said.

Mr. Ceppos, then in his 20s, learned of the deliberations and walked in on the meeting. In a “quiet,” almost “hesitant” manner, Hoyt recalled, Mr. Ceppos asked the senior editor, “Have you read this story?” It ultimately ran on the front page.

Here was a “young, junior guy in the place,” Hoyt said, who “knows that a mistake is about to be made and just does the right thing. … I always thought he had great judgment and great courage.”

Mr. Ceppos spent nine years at the Miami Herald before moving to San Jose. At the Mercury News as well as in his corporate role at Knight Ridder, he took significant steps to increase the diversity of the editorial staff.

“To Jerry, diversity in the newsroom wasn’t just for show,” recalled Lori Aratani, a reporter who covers transportation for The Post and who earlier worked at the Mercury News under Mr. Ceppos. “He truly believed that building a newsroom that reflected the communities it covered helped build trust and credibility.”

A year after Mr. Ceppos left Knight Ridder, the chain was sold to the McClatchy newspaper company. The Mercury News was later sold to MediaNews Group Inc.

Mr. Ceppos served as dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada in Reno and then, from 2011 to 2018, as dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. He helped start a student news wire that served both to train aspiring journalists and to supplement local news coverage with reports on stories including unsolved Ku Klux Klan killings from the civil rights era.

Survivors include his wife of 40 years, the former Karen Feingold of Baton Rouge, and two children, Matthew Ceppos of Reno and Robin Ceppos of Washington.

Mr. Ceppos was the editor of the 2021 book “Covering Politics in the Age of Trump.” His final published newspaper article was a reminiscence of his high school newspaper adviser, Mary Lee Ruddle, who died weeks before he did at 95. She was the person, he wrote, who, when he was a “geeky teenage boy,” gave him the confidence to send him on his way.