In the summer of 2003, The New York Times was still reeling from the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal, which had led to the resignations of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd after the newsroom discovered Blair had plagiarized and fabricated dozens of stories. To help steady the newsroom, incoming executive editor Bill Keller split the managing editor's job for the first time in the paper's history, naming Jill Abramson and John Geddes to share it. Geddes, who spent the next decade running the Times' daily news operations, died on October 20, 2026, at a hospital in Manhattan, at 74.

Geddes came to the Times by a winding route. He studied economics at the University of Rhode Island, then earned a master's degree in business journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. He started out as a reporter for the Ansonia Evening Sentinel, a small daily in Connecticut, and for the A.P.-Dow Jones News Service, before stepping away from newsrooms entirely to run BIS Strategic Decisions, a market research firm, as its chief executive.

He returned to journalism at The Wall Street Journal, where he spent 13 years rising through a string of editing jobs, among them managing editor of The Wall Street Journal/Europe, national news editor, assistant managing editor and senior editor, according to the University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media, where he later served on the executive advisory council. Geddes joined the Times in 1994 as a business editor and was promoted to deputy managing editor in 1997.

The dual appointment itself grew out of the crisis. A 28-member committee led by assistant managing editor Allan Siegal had spent months reviewing how the Blair scandal happened, and it recommended structural fixes, among them a new public editor position and a managing editor job split in two, according to PBS NewsHour. Keller called Geddes and Abramson "superb journalists, genuine leaders, straight shooters" as he installed them to carry out that recommendation, according to Poynter. Abramson took charge of newsgathering, while Geddes ran news operations, the daily machinery of getting the paper out. He held the post for a decade, as the Times built out nytimes.com and reshaped a newsroom accustomed to paper for a readership increasingly arriving online. The Times' own obituary described him simply as savvy and convivial, the editor who kept that machinery running through a turbulent stretch, according to Editor and Publisher.

Geddes announced in January 2013 that he would leave after ten years as managing editor and fifteen years on the Times masthead, accepting a buyout as the paper trimmed its newsroom. "I've arrived at that magical spot where a buyout offer miraculously appears and presents me with new opportunities," he said at the time, according to The Huffington Post. Abramson, by then executive editor, called him "the consummate newsman with superb instincts for stories and people," adding that the two had "been partners in the newsroom for nearly a decade." Dean Baquet succeeded him as the Times' sole managing editor.

Geddes did not stay away from the news business for long. In 2014 he was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, where he examined what the Shorenstein Center called the collision of journalism and digital innovation, studying the reporters and commentators who covered technology directly rather than the industry's own anxious coverage of itself. The next year he joined Bloomberg to help oversee its political coverage ahead of the 2016 presidential race, reporting to Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy and working alongside Bloomberg Politics managing editors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann while splitting his time between the New York and Washington offices, according to The Huffington Post. "I'm very excited to be joining Bloomberg's team covering one of the most chaotic, competitive and historic elections of the past decades," he said, "and looking forward to building Bloomberg's coverage through and beyond 2016." He later joined the executive advisory council of the University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media, his undergraduate alma mater.

He is survived by his wife, Jyll Holzman, who spent her own career on the advertising side of the same newsroom he spent two decades helping run, according to Editor & Publisher.

Geddes spent more than forty years moving between newsrooms and the business side of journalism, from a small Connecticut daily and a market research firm to the masthead of the country's most prominent newspaper. The paper he helped put out every day for a decade, the digital newsroom he helped build inside it, and the line of editors, Abramson and Baquet among them, who carried the Times forward after him are what remain of that work.