Longtime New Jersey journalist Arthur Z. Kamin dies at 84

Arthur Z. Kamin, a longtime newspaperman in New Jersey who also was chairman of the Rutgers University board of trustees, has died. He was 84.

Kamin died Tuesday of Parkinson's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disorder, at a retirement community in Red Bank, New Jersey.

He was editor of the Red Bank Daily Register from 1965 to the mid-1980s.

"We were watchdogs in the public interest," he said in 2000.

Kamin also was a former president of the New Jersey Press Association and a retired member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

From the early 1970s until the early 1990s, Kamin served on Rutgers' board of trustees, and was its chairman from 1982 to 1985, according to university archives.

He graduated from Rutgers in 1954 and was editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, the Daily Targum.

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Kamin joined the Register in 1956 as a reporter and oversaw the paper's transition from a weekly to a daily in 1959, said his son, Blair. Six years later, Kamin became the paper's editor, and in 1971, its president.

Kamin is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, Virginia; his son, Blair; and a daughter, Brooke Kamin Rapaport.

Memorial services will be private. Donations may be made to the Fair Haven First Aid Squad and the Arthur Z. and Virginia P. Kamin Fund for Journalism Innovation in care of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.