Ned Warwick

Edward Ramsey Warwick was born in Philadelphia on May 19, 1945, and grew up in the Germantown and Mount Airy neighborhoods. The oldest of three children, he was a great-grandson of Charles Warwick, a former mayor of Philadelphia. According to his wife, he knew he wanted to be a newsman when he was 16 and spent much of his free time reading newspapers in the high school library.

He graduated from Chestnut Hill Academy and attended Temple University before earning a bachelor's degree in history at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1969.

Warwick began as a city-side reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin from 1969 to 1974. He moved into television at WPVI-TV (Channel 6), where he was a news writer and assignment editor from 1975 to 1981. He was news director at WTVD in Durham, North Carolina, from 1981 to 1986 and returned to WPVI as news director from 1986 to 1990. In 1977 he told Inquirer TV columnist Gail Shister that the TV reporter's job was harder because "they have to be journalists and performers."

From 1990 to 1995 he was based in London as ABC News's director of news operations for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He worked with anchor Peter Jennings and directed coverage of many of the period's biggest international stories, and in 1992 he was pinned down in a gun battle while traveling in Somalia.

He joined The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. He was its foreign and national editor for five years and its foreign correspondent in Jerusalem during and after the 2006 Lebanon war, filing dozens of stories from Gaza City, Bethlehem, Ramallah and elsewhere. He returned to Philadelphia in 2007 as deputy business editor and Pennsylvania editor, and also reported on the royal family from London and reviewed books for the paper. After leaving The Inquirer in 2008 he worked briefly as an editor at large at Bloomberg News and retired in 2010.

Former colleagues described his writing as lyrical and fluid. He mentored younger journalists wherever he worked and with the Rittenhouse Writers' Group, and he completed a first draft of a book of his own.

Warwick married three times. With his first wife, Polly Price, he had a daughter, Katie; with his second wife, Gayle Roth, he had daughters Megan and Eliza. He later married Joan Hunter, with whom he shared a love of museums, theater, the orchestra and travel.

He was a sailor, a pilot, a longtime runner and a student of Buddhism, and he cheered for the Phillies through lean years and good. Asked in 1986 whether flying a plane or running a newsroom was harder, he said: "Clearly, if you don't pay attention in either business, you're going to crash."

Ned Warwick died on Monday, September 14, 2026, at his home near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the age of 81. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease, which he had lived with for eight years; his wife said he refused to leave city living and never lost his sense of humor. His death was reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer on September 23. He was survived by his wife, his three daughters, four grandchildren, a sister and a brother. A memorial service was scheduled for November 14, 2026, at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia, and the family suggested donations to Penn Medicine Neurology and the Katz JCC Parkinson's Connection.

Warwick's career spanned the Bulletin, local and network television and The Inquirer's foreign desk, and colleagues remembered him as both a skilled newsman and a decent one. "No matter what was going on, he was a good human," said former Inquirer colleague Nathan Gorenstein. His daughter Katie Bishop said his mind "was always crafting a story, seeing a story, or preparing to tell one in a way that made everyone near him want to listen."