James L. Snyder, 76, a broadcast journalist for more than 40
years who while working for the Post-Newsweek Stations directed landmark changes
in the format, organization, and operation of Washington radio and television
properties, died April 19 at Buckingham's Choice retirement community in
Adamstown, Md.
He died of complications related to strokes and heart disease.
Mr. Snyder became vice president for news at Post-Newsweek
Stations in 1968. His first assignment was to organize and launch the successful
and immensely popular all-news format at WTOP AM radio, which at that time was
owned by The Washington Post Co.
He became news director of WTOP-TV in 1969 and began building
a news organization that became a pace setter in local television news. He
paired Max Robinson and Gordon Peterson, and he was among the first to put an
African American woman broadcaster on Washington television. Many of the people
he hired in the 1970s are still with the station, which has changed ownership
twice and is now Gannett's WUSA-TV.
In 1978, when WTOP was swapped by Post-Newsweek Stations for
WDIV-TV in Detroit, Mr. Snyder moved to Detroit as news director there. He
returned to Washington and Post-Newsweek corporate headquarters in 1982 as
consultant to the news departments in the Post-Newsweek stations in Miami,
Jacksonville, Detroit and Hartford. From 1969 until his retirement, he also was
executive producer of the weekly news discussion program "Agronsky and
Company," which became Inside Washington in the late 1980s.
Mr. Snyder retired in 1991 as a corporate consultant to news
departments in Post-Newsweek television stations,
In 1991 and 1992, he traveled to Romania and Bulgaria for the
International Media Fund, lecturing on American television news to groups
interested in establishing a free broadcasting system.
In 1992, he became the first recipient of the Leonard
Ziedenberg First Amendment Award. He received the Board of Governors Award of
the Washington chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
in 1977.
Mr. Snyder was born in Pittsburgh. During World War II, he
served in the Navy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
He began his broadcast career in the late 1940s when he was a
college student. He worked for radio stations in Pittsburgh before relocating to
Washington in 1959 as chief of the Washington bureau for Westinghouse
Broadcasting.
In that capacity, he covered the final years of the Eisenhower
administration, the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, political conventions and
the Kennedy assassination and funeral. In 1965, he became the Washington
producer for the "CBS Morning News." Later, he was the Washington
producer for the "CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite. Mr. Snyder
left CBS in 1968 to join Post-Newsweek Stations.
Mr. Snyder was a volunteer reader for the visually impaired
for Washington Ear, a member of St. Jane de Chantal Catholic Church in Bethesda
and its St. Vincent de Paul Society, a golfer and a member of Kenwood Golf and
Country Club.
Mr. Snyder, a longtime resident of Bethesda, moved to
Buckingham's Choice in January 2000.
Survivors include his wife of 50 years, Anne Marie of
Adamstown; five children, Mary S. Martin of Arlington, John P. Snyder of
Frederick, James W. Snyder of Silver Spring, Catherine Snyder Charlip of
Bethesda and Owen B. Snyder of Dedham, Mass.; and eight grandchildren. A
daughter, Margaret Snyder Fugger, died in 1975.
