The Tampa Times, Tampa, Florida, Tuesday, October 22, 1998
Maynard Parker, who as editor of Newsweek helped transform the weekly newsmagazine from a digest of foreign and political events into a publication that put greater emphasis on science, religion, social issues and technology, died Friday October 16, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, New York. He was 58.
Parker, who had been suffering from leukemia for the past year, died of complications from pneumonia, said Richard Smith, the chairman and editor in chief of Newsweek. Parker re-entered the hospital in September after closing Newsweek’s cover story on the Starr report.
He was Newsweek’s editor for the last 16 years and helped to increase Newsweek’s total paid circulation and make the magazine more competitive with Time magazine. Time remains the bestselling weekly newsmagazine, but Newsweek narrowed the gap, creating real competition between the two publications. Newsweek’s circulation increased to 3.2 million in 1998 from 3 million when Parker took over as editor in 1982.
Maynard Michael Parker was born in Los Angeles on July 28, 1940. After graduating from Stanford University in 1962, he went on to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism a year later, and started out as a reporter at Life magazine in 1963.
He moved to Newsweek in 1967, where he continued to cover Hong Kong and went on to become Saigon bureau chief. As bureau chief there and later in Hong Kong, he led Newsweek’s coverage of the Vietnam War.
He returned to the United States in 1973 to become managing editor of Newsweek International, a new global newsmagazine, and went on to be Newsweek’s national editor, assistant managing editor and then executive editor.
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