“As soon as she could write, she started writing stories,” Judy Kovac, one of her sisters, said in a telephone interview. In high school, Ms. Kay won a summer scholarship to study writing at Allegheny College. She graduated from Penn State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
After working at The Pittsburgh Press and Newsday, on Long Island, she was hired by The Times as a copy editor in 1995. As the metro desk’s enterprise editor, she edited a Pulitzer-winning series by Clifford Levy about the neglect of mentally ill people at privately run adult homes. She was promoted to deputy investigations editor in 2004.
Another series she edited, by Andrea Elliott, about a homeless 11-year-old Brooklyn girl named Dasani, won a George Polk Award for local reporting.
Ms. Kay’s best traits as an editor were on display in her work on that series, said Matthew Purdy, a Times deputy managing editor and former investigations editor: “a fine-tuned moral outrage, a vision of the untold story, a stubbornness for detail and structure, a drive for impact and, above all, a devotion to the story.”
In addition to her sister Judy, Ms. Kay is survived by two other sisters, Kathleen Spechtold and Mary Beth Abraham.
In 2015, Ms. Kay took on a new position in which she was charged with conceiving and editing enterprise articles and projects throughout the news department. The next year, she shared the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award with the reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Michael Corkery and Robert Gebeloff for “Beware the Fine Print,” a three-part series that uncovered the powerful impact of arbitration clauses on Americans’ lives. The series also won a Polk Award.
“At the very start, she believed, against all odds, that we could get readers enraged about a seemingly arcane subject: the fine print in millions of contracts,” Ms. Silver-Greenberg said in an email. “To help me expose how big banks and major American retailers have built a way out of the justice system, she basically went to law school, teaching herself the intricacies of constitutional and contract law.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/obituaries/christine-kay-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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