“Reporter-researcher” double-checked the facts in Time magazine’s stories.
Nancy Avrum Newman (1931-2008)
Nancy Newman was a Time magazine researcher for more than 30 years, doing crucial, painstaking research with little credit. A 1982 article said the position of Time researcher required “meticulous, caring, even reverential, attention to fact.” Two and a half million words per year were checked for accuracy and clarity by the staff of more than 50 reporter-researchers, the article noted.
In the fact-checking system, journalists at Time found “their stories subjected to a telexed barrage of researcher questions, called check points, to review for accuracy,” the article said. Errors did occur, but “in each case the cause is traced and discussed to ensure that that mistake—or that kind of mistake—will not be made again.”
Born in South Manchester, Connecticut, on January 3, 1931, Nancy was the only child of David E. Newman and the former Irene Lavitt. Nancy’s maternal grandfather, Max Lavitt, emigrated from Russia to Norfolk, Virginia, and later moved to Connecticut, where he introduced the first shade-grown tobacco cultivated east of the Connecticut River. Nancy’s mother grew up on the family tobacco farm in Ellington, northeast of Hartford. By 1928, there were more than 5,000 Jewish farm families in Connecticut; it was close to New York City, and land in the state was rocky and cheap.
Irene graduated from the Connecticut Training School, which later became the Yale School of Nursing, and practiced private duty nursing at the Hartford Hospital. Nancy’s father, David, was a traveling salesman.
Nancy attended Weaver High School in Hartford and had the highest average of her class during her junior year. She was valedictorian of the senior class, club editor of the school paper, secretary of the French Club, and a member of the Girls League and the National Honor Society. She told the Hartford Courant that she hoped to attend either Radcliffe or Wellesley.
Nancy did attend Radcliffe College, majoring in government and graduating in 1953. By January 1954. she had a job working as an assistant to host Allen Ludden on “College Quiz Bowl,” which NBC billed as an “intercollegiate battle of brains.” Perhaps due to Nancy’s influence, Radcliffe was the first women’s college represented on the program, just a little over a year after Nancy graduated. On November 7, 1954, when Radcliffe students were pitted against three men and one woman from the University of Minnesota in Radio City Music Hall, Nancy must have been crushed when her alma mater lost.
Nancy’s name first appeared on the Time masthead as an “editorial researcher” on January 18, 1960. The cover story was “Getting to Work: The Trials of U.S. Commuters.” Radcliffe was a feeder school for Time Inc. jobs. By 1967, a dozen Radcliffe graduates were working at Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. The jobs were crucial to Time’s reputation: In the fast pace of putting out a weekly news magazine, the level of detail and analysis in the articles required extensive research.
But to be a researcher at the time also meant her options for advancement were limited. When Nancy started at Time, all the researchers were women, and all the editors and writers were men. In 1971, the women at Newsweek filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over the sex-segregation of the magazine’s jobs. As a result, Time’s research manual was rewritten, and “researchers” were renamed “reporter-researchers.” Subsequently, the positions were opened to men, and by 1973, Time had hired four men for the job. The idea was that hiring men would make the fact-checking job a legitimate, entry-level, boot-camp position rather than a service profession, which it had been when only women performed the work.
Nancy researched the Bolshoi Ballet, opera singer Cecelia Bartoli, modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, National Public Radio, ballerina Darci Kistler, soprano Leontyne Price, and Marimba. She last appeared in the masthead on July 6, 1992, with the cover story “Pills for the Mind,” about antidepressants. She died May 1, 2008, at age 77.
Nancy Newman’s fund in The Trust supports arts and education, and has supported nonprofits such as City Lore, DreamYard Project, Bronx Children’s Museum, and the Fund for Public Schools.