Robert Brandt, former Newsday managing editor, dies

In an often hard-charging newsroom world, Newsday managing editor Robert F. Brandt excelled with brilliant editing, unflappable calm, even when catastrophic events erupted around the world, while always taking care of his colleagues.

“As the night managing editor, Bob had tremendous impact; ultimately, he decided what got into the paper, and what didn’t, and how much attention a story should receive,” said Howard Schneider, a former Newsday editor and founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University.

“The decisions and standards he set day in and day out really shaped Newsday’s character and defined its public face,” Schneider said. “He really was an unsung hero. He made those decisions during a period in which Newsday was winning the Pulitzer Prize and other journalistic awards.”

Brandt, who died Friday in a Maryland hospice at age 72, completely redid the paper the night TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 passengers, his former colleagues recalled.

Brandt’s colleagues admired the way he encouraged and mentored co-workers — and for leavening the atmosphere with humor and good fun.

While in school, Brandt, a guitarist, led a band in Kentucky that opened for Ike & Tina Turner. One summer, he toured with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, recalled his widow, Walda DuPriest, of St. Michaels, Maryland.

One of his last musical endeavors, she said, was learning the jazz version of Eric Clapton’s “Layla.”

When he retired after serving more than 15 years as managing editor, Brandt said he was proud of his role in converting Newsday from an afternoon to a morning newspaper, in the mid-1980s when afternoon papers were struggling. He also advanced Newsday’s efforts to hire more minority staff members.

Said Robert Keane, a former managing editor: “He tried to make sure that everybody knew that they contributed and that he held them in great esteem and importance.”

“But he would occasionally get ticked off when the folks who were running the building would do things that made life miserable for the people who work nights,” Keane said, such as setting the temperature too high in summer after the day shift went home.

Keane, also a former Newsday chief of staff, recalled Brandt once “dropping a fistful of receipts on my desk,” saying “That’s for the ice cream.”

“He had ordered giant tubs of ice cream to be brought to the editorial department to kind of cool things down.” This was not a one-off. “He did it routinely.”

Staffers also could look forward to an abundance of pizza and various festivities, including mint juleps on Kentucky Derby day. Once, a colleague arrived to find his desk wrapped in yellow crime scene tape — because there had been an abduction.

“One of the funniest things that happened was his kidnapping of the red, stuffed bulldog of a staffer, and sending hostage pictures,” his widow said. The stuffed animal, which was eventually returned, symbolized a newspaper’s early Sunday edition, called the bulldog.

As it happens, Brandt was a dog lover; one of his charities was the Guide Dog Foundation, and he was chairman of the Smithtown chapter.

Anthony Marro, a former Newsday editor, said Brandt was part of the team that took Newsday from a fine but regional newspaper to one that “could tell people what was going on not only in their neighborhoods and communities but in the world.”

Brandt, he said, “took a lot of good work the reporters were doing and made it better.”

Before joining Newsday in 1981, Brandt had worked at the Tampa Tribune, Hartford Courant, Miami Herald and Washington Star.

After retiring, Brandt wrote “Chameleon: The True Story of an Impostor’s Remarkable Odyssey” about New York socialite Henry Sanger Snow, an embezzler who launched a new career in Venezuela.

In addition to his wife, Brandt is survived by a sister, Ann Brandt, of Kentucky. The first of two services will be held next Saturday in Easton, Maryland. After a second service that has yet to be finalized, he will be buried in Louisville.