Legendary Inquirer editor Jim Naughton dies

James M. Naughton, a retired Inquirer editor who embraced life with uncommon delight - his legendary pranks included wearing a chicken costume at a presidential news conference and springing all manner of livestock on unsuspecting colleagues -- died Saturday in Florida. He was 73.

He battled prostate cancer for more than a decade. His death was announced by a posting on his facebook page. "Friends of Jim," it read: "Thank you for the extraordinary messages of friendship, encouragement and celebration. Your love, with ours, helped him cross to the other side."

Naughton stepped down as the Inquirer's executive editor in 1996 after 19 years at the newspaper. He became president of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he retired in 2003 and lived with his wife, Diana, his childhood sweetheart from Ohio.

An impish man with a disarming smile, Naughton was irrepressably mischievous. As the chief of newsgathering operations when the Inquirer won more than a dozen Pulitzers, he injected the newsroom with a puckish spirit that he believed stimulated creativity and cohesion.

"He was an extraordinarily important player at the Inquirer," said Eugene L. Roberts Jr., the editor who recruited Naughton from the New York Times in 1977 and whose corner office was occupied once by a camel and another time by 46 frogs, thanks to Naughton. "I thought he would be good for newsroom morale, and he exceeded my expectations."

For all the frivolity, Naughton was a serious journalist, admired as a fierce interviewer, an engaging writer and a speedy editor.

In his early 30s, Naughton covered the White House for the Times during the tumultuous Watergate years. In The Boys on the Bus, a book about the 1972 presidential campaign, author Timothy Crouse portrayed Naughton as one of the more endearing journalists in the pack. He described Naughton as badly dressed and "meticulously polite" whose "greatest ambition was to someday to take over Russell Baker's humor column in the Times."

Service announcements will be available soon.