Soma Golden Bear, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a man of many talents with story ideas flying in all four directions and whose journalistic passion for poverty, race and class led to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 84.
She died in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital after breast cancer spread to other organs, said her husband, William A. Baer.
Golden Bear's economics degree from Radcliffe College sparked a lifelong interest in issues of inequality and helped oversee several major series at The Times that examined class and racial divides, each of which assembled teams of reporters and cameramen for intensive, sometimes year-long assignments.
“Race in America,” edited by Gerald M. Boyd, the paper's first black editor-in-chief, overturned the conventional wisdom that the United States had become a “post-racial country” at the start of the 21st century. Its deep coverage of integrated churches, the military, and slaughterhouses won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for domestic reporting in 2001.
Another series, “Class in America,” was published in 2005 and examines how social class, often implicit, creates obvious inequalities in society.
Golden Bear also previously shattered stereotypes about inner-city youth with his 10-part series “Children of the Shadows,” directed by reporter Isabel Wilkerson in 1993. The series won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for its poignant portrayal of a 10-year-old boy caring for his four siblings.
Ms. Golden Bear was hired by The Times in 1973 as a business reporter after 11 years at Business Week, where she was often one of the few or only women. She was appointed in 1987 and was the first to head the national desk, and after being promoted to deputy editor in 1993, she became only the second woman to move from the editorial board to the editorial position.
“At 5-foot-10-and-a-half, her presence resonated in any room and she rarely had to worry about men interrupting her gave her an advantage over many of The Times' female reporters,” Adam Nagorny wrote in “The Times,” a 2023 book about the paper's modern history.
Nagornyy described her as “intelligent, thoughtful and explosive – all in one,” and said in an interview, “I'm a jumble of words, and I explode a lot.”
Jonathan Landman, a former deputy editor at The Times whom Mr. Golden Bear poached from the editorial department to edit the paper's domestic correspondents, said his style was distinctly different from other editors-in-chief.
“She wasn't the kind of editor who would say you need X to write Y,” he said. “She'd say, 'You need to think about housing!' What followed were interesting conversations and notes, and she would get people to think about the subject in a different way. It was special.”
Although Golden Bear was a pioneer and a mentor to other women at the newspaper, she did not consider herself a philosophical feminist.
In 1991, while she was national editor, the paper came under fire for a profile of a young woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics inside and outside the paper accused it of voyeurism and of shaming the woman by quoting a friend who said, “She's a bit of a wild side.”
During the contentious all-new editorial meeting, Golden Bear defended the piece, saying he was “shocked by the response,” adding that it “doesn't account for all the weird people who read The New York Times.”
Soma Suzanne Golden was born on August 27, 1939, in Washington, DC, the eldest of three children to Dr. Benjamin Golden, a surgeon, and Edith (Syden) Golden.
She received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College and her master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She married Baer, ​​a social worker and psychoanalyst, in 1974. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, New York.
Stephen Greenhouse, a former business and labor reporter for The Times, recalled that when Mr. Golden Bear was lured away from Business Week, where he was chief economics correspondent in Washington, in 1973, it was seen as a coup.
“What made the coup even bigger at the time was that Somma was a female star,” Greenhouse said. “She was very respected in the economics field.”
Four years later, Golden Bear was appointed to the editorial board, where she was the only woman to write editorials dedicated to women's issues, gay rights and inequality.
“A few years later she said, 'I don't think I have any more opinions; I've said it all,'” recalled Ms. Baer, ​​who went on to edit the Sunday business section for five years.
Besides her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Ariel G. Baer, ​​who works for a nonprofit that funds affordable housing, her son, Zachary G. Baer, ​​an executive at the History Channel, four grandchildren, and her sister, Carol Golden.
Golden Bear retired from journalism in 2005 to become director of the New York Times College Scholars Program, which provides four years of tuition to high-achieving students who have faced homelessness or other hardships.
When funding was cut, Golden Bear and his partner, Melanie Rosen Brooks, founded a similar, independent program, Scholarship Plus, in 2010, as an extension of Golden Bear's desire to address inequality. The endowed program supports 20 students from poor families each year, supplementing their college financial aid to help them avoid student loan debt and putting scholars on an equal footing with more affluent students.
Ms. Golden Bear sometimes missed the camaraderie of the newsroom, and would invite the journalists she had worked with over the years, all women, to her Upper West Side home for get-togethers, where as many as 30 women drove up from Boston before the pandemic put an end to the gatherings.