Elizabeth Pochoda, a journalist who widely traversed the media landscape of New York during her 50-year career, editing and writing for publications as diverse as The Nation, Vogue and The Daily News in New York, died on May 8 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 83.
Her death, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., was confirmed by her daughter, the novelist Ivy Pochoda.
Ms. Pochoda (pronounced pah-CO-da), who was known as Betsy, worked at fashion magazines (Mirabella and Vogue) and shelter magazines (House & Garden). She worked at general-interest publications (she was part of the team that relaunched Vanity Fair in the early 1980s) and at niche publications (The Magazine Antiques).
And she worked at publications with starkly different readerships, including the progressive magazine The Nation — from which she decamped for awhile to co-found the august literary magazine Grand Street — Entertainment Weekly, The New York Post and The Daily News.
Not that Ms. Pochoda had any patience with readership distinctions. “I don’t believe in different brows — high, low, middle,” she told Chicago Reader in 1993. “I believe if you write about things with the proper excitement, they’re accessible to everybody.”
“Betsy just had an amazingly broad vision, whether it was in the antiques world, the political world or the arts world,” said Eleanor Gustafson, a consulting editor at Antiques, who was the magazine’s executive editor during Ms. Pochoda’s tenure as editor in chief from 2009 to 2016.
To transform Antiques into something less, well, antique and more appealing to a wider audience, Ms. Pochoda asked Ted Muehling, a designer of jewelry and decorative objects, to go to the Shelburne Museum, in Vermont, choose an object that resonated with him in its vast collection of Americana, and write about it. Toots Zynsky, a glass artist, undertook a similar mission at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass., which focuses on Asian, Native American and folk art.
“She was a brilliant editor and enormously creative,” said Dominique Browning, who brought Ms. Pochoda along when she moved from the top of the masthead at Mirabella to the top slot at House & Garden in the mid-1990s.
“She was very clever at connecting writers with subjects: She had Michael Pollan writing about picture windows,” Ms. Browning continued, referring to the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (2006).
Ms. Pochoda, who had “a very quirky sensibility,” Ms. Browning said, commissioned the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien to write about her fax machine, and the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick to write about ladles.
She also supported writers in the ways that perhaps mattered to them most: financially and typographically.
“She called me cold and told me she had wanted me to write for The Nation, but was embarrassed because the fees there were so low,” the jazz critic and writer Gary Giddins said in an interview. But once she was at Vanity Fair, he added, “she wanted to give me a contract.”
When, as a possible subject, Mr. Giddins suggested Biréli Lagrène, a teenage French jazz guitarist who had recently recorded his first album, “Betsy told her boss: ‘Gary is the only person who can do this. We have to send him to Salzburg to do the interview,’” Mr. Giddins said. “And then Betsy told me: ‘You can’t just go to Salzburg. While you’re there, you have to go to Vienna, too.’ She was an enthusiast who protected her writers.”
Katrine Ames, a writer and editor who was on the House & Garden staff with Ms. Pochoda and who later wrote for her at Antiques, recalled an assignment to profile Ulysses Grant Dietz, then the chief curator at the Newark Museum. “I told Betsy it was way over the length she’d asked for, but there was such great information, and I told her I would trim it,” Ms. Ames said in an interview. “And she said: ‘No, I’m not going to cut a word. I’m just going to put it in smaller print.’”
The youngest of three children, Elizabeth Jane Turner was born on Dec. 13, 1941, in Chicago. Her father, Frederick, was a lawyer; her mother, Frances (Franklin) Turner, managed the household.
After earning a B.A. in English literature at Connecticut College, she went on to get a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. That same year, she married Philip Pochoda, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who later became an editor and book publisher.
Ms. Pochoda was a professor of English literature at Temple University when, in 1976, she was offered the job of literary editor for The Nation on the strength of a recommendation from Philip Roth.
“I’d written a review of his comic fantasy ‘The Breast,’ and we met for drinks in Philadelphia after his class at the University of Pennsylvania,” Ms. Pochoda recalled in a tribute to Mr. Roth in The Nation after his death in 2018. “I was a fledgling academic, and I told him that I wanted out, that tenure was the worst thing that could befall me.”
“Betsy found journalism exciting,” Mr. Pochoda said in an interview. “We were both active in the antiwar movement, and Betsy was very outfacing about her beliefs and her cultural politics. The Nation was a much better fit than a life of academia.”
As The Nation’s books and arts editor, Ms. Pochoda was eager to “take on the rising tide of cant — she was keen on critics of received opinion,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, then the editor of the magazine and now its editorial director and publisher, said in an interview.
“She wanted to take on the big books, the books on the best-seller lists,” she said, adding: “She was not earnest. Betsy hated earnest. But she was tough. She was steel.”
Ms. Pochoda was as sharp and witty a writer as many of those she edited. “Here is a curious moment in the annals of American literary fetishism,” she wrote in a 2019 column for The Nation about the auction of Mr. Roth’s personal effects, taking due note of the mild interest in “the master’s Sandy Koufax baseball card and a badly chipped Pat and Dick Nixon souvenir plate.”
They were, she observed, “the leavings of a man well known for taking to heart Flaubert’s advice that writers should live modestly if they want to be wild and original in their work.”
Ms. Pochoda’s marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, Ivy, she is survived by a granddaughter and a brother, Frederick W. Turner.
“My tremendous mother passed this morning after a brief battle with A.L.S.,” Ms. Pochoda wrote in an Instagram post on Thursday. “Because she’s not around to edit this post, it’s going to be filled with platitudes. She would probably ask me to revise and resubmit.”
