Peter Kaplan, who edited the New York Observer from 1994-2009, died Friday of cancer. He was 59. Terry Golway, a longtime political reporter and city editor at the paper, writes about how Kaplan mentored countless writers.
Every Wednesday morning on the third floor of an aging town house on East 64th Street, Peter W. Kaplan conducted a loud, brash and terribly ambitious orchestra known as the New York Observer, a weekly newspaper devoured by Manhattan’s civic, cultural and business elites.
The Wednesday performances were always quite a show. Over there, in the back, came the brassy sounds of the real estate reporter. In front of him, the sharp notes of politics. To his right, waiting a cue, were the drums and cymbals of those who told stories about Manhattan’s self-styled masters of the universe.
All these sounds, all this ambition, all clamoring to his attention, awaiting a bemused squint, a tilt of his head, a smile of recognition.
Kaplan, who died at the too-young age of 59, wielded his editorial baton with the panache of Toscanini, the passion of Bernstein and an intelligence that was all his own.
He had a laugh that may have shattered windows on Park Avenue, and it came easily and often. And he had an uncanny ability to size up a story in a matter of seconds. All it took, apparently, was a good nose. “You can smell a good story,” he once told me.
He inspired reporters and writers who told the story of New York in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era in a way nobody else would, or could.
He insisted that reporters follow their passions — and heaven help the reporter who suggested a story with anything less than absolute enthusiasm.
He believed readers ought to hear the author’s voice, freeing them to write as well as report. But that freedom came with responsibility: The reporting had to be exhaustive, and it had to be right.
“Attitude is cheap,” Kaplan often said.
He chafed when other media outlets referred to the Observer’s sharp edges as “snarky.” Snark, he said, was what writers produced when they were too lazy to report.
Nobody dared try that at Peter Kaplan’s Observer. He’d sniff out mere snark in a New York minute, because he often knew more about a reporter’s subject than the reporter did.
Kaplan’s knowledge of the city was breathtaking.
To his dying day, Peter Kaplan believed that New York was home to the greatest stories in the world. And, lucky for us, he trained a generation of writers in the art of story-telling.