and self-effacing style attracted, nurtured, and often inspired a new generation of young writers including Judith Crist, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Denis Hamill, Gail Sheehy, Maureen Dowd and Tony Castro. At the Herald Tribune, it was Bellows' initiative to hire Esquire editor Clay Felker and create a new Sunday supplement focused on local issues and events; within two years it became the still-popular New York magazine. Richard Wald, Fred W. Friendly Professor of Professional Practice in Media and Society at Columbia University (and former ABC News "ethics czar") said, “Jim changed the way a lot of newspapers look today, in the sense of making a page of newsprint more inviting and understandable. And just as he made great innovations in how newspapers looked, he changed the way they read.” Bellows's memoir, The Last Editor: How I saved the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency (2002), was also made into a PBS documentary. It chronicled his (mostly unsuccessful) fight to save the underdog papers at a time when newspapers were the dominant media in some of the most turbulent times of the United States. In the process, he claimed “The New York Herald Tribune made The New York Times a livelier paper than it was before... The Washington Star made The Washington Post a less institutional paper. And the Los Angeles Times was put on its mettle by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner..." He also held positions at USA Today: The Television Show, the Prodigy online news service, the Los Angeles Daily News, and others. Singular accomplishments In April 1963, Bellows published Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune. While editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, intrigued by the absence of coverage for the shooting death of a 39-year-old black woman, Bellows initiated a major reporting examination of the conduct of the Los Angeles Police Department, a subject previously ignored or avoided by the area's new outlets. Death Bellows died on March 6, 2009 of Alzheimer's disease at a nursing home in Santa Monica. References External links 1922 births 2009 deaths Writers from Los Angeles Kenyon College alumni American newspaper editors American male journalists New York Herald Tribune people Deaths from dementia in California Deaths from Alzheimer's disease South Kent School alumni Detroit Free Press people The Washington Star people