John D. Pomfret, Key Figure in Revamping The Times, Dies at 93

John D. Pomfret, who as a New York Times executive was instrumental in a watershed effort in the mid-1970s to modernize the newspaper’s format, boost its advertising revenue and improve its productivity with the introduction of computer technology, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Seattle. He was 93.

The cause was pneumonia, his son, John E. Pomfret II, said.

Mr. Pomfret was among the half-dozen editors and business executives who, under Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher at the time, revived the company at a financially precarious time by creating a raft of stand-alone weekly sections — on food, home design, science and weekend entertainment — that proved popular with readers and advertisers alike. The Times also introduced Sunday regional sections that expanded the paper’s appeal to suburbanites in the New York metropolitan area.

Until then the paper had consisted of just two sections, of many pages each.

Mr. Pomfret was the last surviving member of the management team that spearheaded the transformation, beginning with Weekend on Fridays, which made its debut in April 1976. The others included Walter E. Mattson, the general manager; Louis Silverstein, the corporate art director; and the editors A.M. Rosenthal, Arthur Gelb and Seymour Topping.

“Our penetration of the segment of the market we consider our target audience is thin in the city and worse in the suburbs,” Mr. Pomfret had advised Mr. Sulzberger, according to “The Paper’s Papers,” Richard F. Shepard’s 1996 book about The Times. He first suggested creating the Weekend section and made tentative suggestions for the themes of four other weekday sections, each to appear weekly.

“Working as a team,” Mr. Topping, who died in November, wrote in a memoir, “we transformed the daily Times into a four-section paper.”

Mr. Pomfret, who as the advertising director of his college newspaper had learned to set type by hand, presided during The Times’s labor-saving shift from typewriters and hot-lead Linotype machines to computerized word processing and electronic typesetting. The move resulted from a groundbreaking 11-year union contract that guaranteed continued employment for 800 printers until they retired and their jobs disappeared through attrition.

Mr. Pomfret had taken an unorthodox route in joining the business side of The Times: He got there by way of the newsroom. He had been a reporter in The Times’s Washington bureau, variously covering the White House, the Supreme Court, civil rights and labor, beginning in 1962.

During the prolonged strike against New York’s newspapers in 1965, he happened to be talking with Mr. Sulzberger, who was familiarly known as Punch, when Mr. Pomfret commented that, in his view, the Times Company’s labor relations policies were counterproductive.

As Mr. Pomfret recalled in an unpublished memoir: “About a year after the strike ended, Punch Sulzberger telephoned me. ‘Pomfret,’ he said. ‘I want you to come up to New York and straighten them out.’ When the top man asked you to do something, you either did it or quit. I wasn’t ready to quit, so the family moved to New York.”

He joined The Times as assistant to the director of industrial relations in 1966. He was later director of industrial relations, assistant to the publisher, coordinator of planning and assistant general manager before being promoted to corporate vice president in 1971, senior vice president in 1973, general manager of The Times in 1979 and executive vice president of the newspaper in 1981.

He retired as general manager and executive vice president in 1988.

John Dana Pomfret was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Princeton, N.J., to John E. and Sara (Wise) Pomfret. His father became president of the College of William & Mary in Virginia and later director of the Huntington Library and Art Museum in California; his mother was a homemaker.

Mr. Pomfret attended Princeton University, where his father had taught history, and joined the campus newspaper as its advertising director. He graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1949, then earned a master’s in business administration at Harvard.

After serving in the Army, he met Mr. Sulzberger while both were working as young reporters for The Milwaukee Journal. Mr. Pomfret had gotten that job because the company’s chairman was a friend of his father’s.

“Today there is a lot of opposition to equal opportunity programs for women and Blacks,” Mr. Pomfret wrote in his memoir. “I am not among the opponents because I profited from an equal opportunity program in place back then and still in place for young white males.”

He joined The Times not long after returning to The Journal from a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.

His wife, Margaret Elizabeth (Haas) Pomfret, died in 2016. In addition to his son, a journalist and author, he is survived by their daughter, Dana Katherine Pomfret, and three grandchildren.