John M. Geddes

John Martin Geddes was born on 19 November 1951 in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Thomas, was an accountant who became the treasurer of Rhode Island College, and his mother, Gertrude (Carroll) Geddes, was an elementary school teacher.

He studied economics at the University of Rhode Island, graduating in 1974, and earned a master's degree in business journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. He later said he went into journalism partly because he wanted a job without repetition, with something new to deal with each day.

Geddes started as a reporter at The Ansonia Evening Sentinel in Connecticut and then reported for the AP-Dow Jones News Service in New York and Bonn. In the late 1970s he covered economics for The New York Times from Bonn before moving to The Wall Street Journal, where he spent 13 years as German bureau chief, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, news editor, assistant managing editor, senior editor and national news editor.

He left the Journal to join Friday Holdings, an investment partnership, and was chief executive of BIS Strategic Decisions, a market research company it acquired. In 1994 he joined The Times as business editor, where he helped start the Circuits technology section. He was named deputy managing editor in 1997, a year after the paper launched nytimes.com.

In 2003 executive editor Bill Keller appointed him managing editor for news operations, one of two managing editors alongside Jill Abramson. Geddes handled production, budgeting and staffing as the paper faced falling print revenue and expanded online. After the paywall was introduced in 2011, Abramson widened his role to identifying and developing new digital ventures with the company's business executives. He accepted a buyout in January 2013, having served under four executive editors.

After leaving The Times he was a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in autumn 2014, producing a paper on technology journalists and the transformation of the news business, and later served as managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, directing its coverage of the 2016 election.

Geddes married Erika Wilksen in 1992; the marriage ended in divorce, and they had two children, Christine and Alex. He was later married to Jyll Holzman, a former senior vice president for advertising at The Times. He was also survived by two sisters, Maggie and Mary, a brother, Pete, and a grandson.

Geddes died on Tuesday 20 October 2026 in a hospital in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 74. His wife, Jyll Holzman, told The New York Times that the cause was lung disease linked to the medication he had been taking for rheumatoid arthritis. The Times published his obituary the following day, with tributes from former executive editors Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet.

Geddes is remembered as the manager who kept The New York Times running day to day while it moved from a print newspaper to a global digital newsroom. Abramson said the paper desperately needed his humour and strength during that transition, and Baquet called him an editor who understood both the businesses the paper covered and the business it was in, likening him to a math major in a sea of English majors. Public editor Daniel Okrent singled out his view that The Times could never be an all-knowing paper of record, only a newspaper that tried to exceed its everyday limits.