Newspaper editor James Bellows dies at 86

NEW YORK, March 7 (UPI) -- "New Journalism" editor James Bellows, whose 1960s efforts led to the creation of New York magazine, has died at age 86, his wife says.

Bellows died Friday in a Los Angeles assisted-care facility of Alzheimer's disease, his wife Keven told Saturday's New York Times.

Bellows had a 34-year career at eight newspapers, including The Washington Star and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. But he is best known as the editor in the 1960s of the New York Herald Tribune, where he allowed such "new journalists" as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Judith Crist to develop a new style of news coverage, the Times reported.

At the Herald Tribune, Bellows in 1963 hired former Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker to develop a Sunday supplement that eventually outlived the newspaper and became New York magazine. In the supplement, Bellows and Felker gave free rein to the New Journalism style, in which writers used novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth, the Times said.

Bellows insisted on extensive coverage of the civil rights movement. He also changed the look of the modern newspaper, using horizontal composition and larger photographs, the Times reported.

Besides his wife and their daughter, Bellows is survived by three daughters from his first marriage, a stepson and 10 grandchildren.