Paul Colford, longtime journalist and author who became top AP spokesman, dies at 71

Associated Press (AP) — Paul Colford, an inexhaustibly curious journalist and author who covered the media business for decades before seeing it from another vantage point as The Associated Press’ chief spokesperson, has died. He was 71.

Colford, who retired from the AP in 2017, died Aug. 26 after a fall the previous month turned a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease into a rapid decline, said his wife, Anne LaBate. Despite his health problems, he was working even in recent months on his third book, about a notorious figure from his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey.

During a decade as AP’s director and ultimately vice president of media relations, Colford was known for his sage, unflappable handling of the news cooperative’s dealings with other media outlets, from requests for interviews with its journalists to inquiries about its practices.

“Paul was both graceful and tough and believed completely in the AP’s journalists and their mission. That was important during some pretty tough moments, particularly when an AP journalist was hurt or worse,” said Kathleen Carroll, who was the news service’s executive editor from 2002 to 2016. She recalled Colford as “a talented and classy colleague” who loved journalism.

He knew the ecosystem well

Colford knew the media ecosystem from the inside out and the outside in, having been a media reporter and columnist for the Daily News of New York, Newsday and the former New York Newsday. He covered magazines, book publishing, newspapers’ digital evolution and the new media of the dot-com era. Reporting on the radio landscape as conservative talk rose to prominence, Colford penned unauthorized biographies of Rush Limbaugh and shock jock Howard Stern.

“He just was indefatigable,” said longtime Newsday TV writer and critic Verne Gay, a colleague and friend of Colford’s. “He vacuumed everything up. He knew everything and everybody. And he constantly broke stories on the beat…. I was just in awe of him.”

Born Sept. 24, 1953, in Jersey City, Colford grew up there with seven siblings and graduated in 1975 from St. Peter’s University. He spent part of his college years studying in Turin, Italy, and still spoke Italian in phone calls with friends from that time, his wife said.

His early jobs included a stint at The Courier News of central New Jersey, where the couple met and dated for a time in the 1970s. He took her to the first Shakespeare in the Park production she ever attended, she recalled.

The relationship fizzled, Colford went on to New York Newsday and later the Daily News, and he married the late Jane Colford and had two children, Catherine and Liam. He and LaBate still had ties through friends and family, and they got back together after he was widowed.

“We certainly both had lived whole lives” in the meantime, she said, but “it was probably even a clearer connection.” They married in 2022.

A relied-upon figure during his AP years

Colford’s professional life also had evolved. He took the AP’s media relations job in 2007.

“To him, it was a natural extension of everything he’d ever done, which was: collect the facts, make sure that everything is accurate, make sure people get information in a timely manner,” Gay said. “It was about getting information to people who needed it.”

The job, in a 24/7 global news operation, is not easy. Tom Kent, who was AP’s standards editor during much of Colford’s tenure, recalled him as invaluable in responding to public controversies that erupted at times over its reports.

As editors debated, readers and viewers complained and other news outlets called for comment, Colford kept his cool and gave smart guidance about how best to react, said Kent, now a consultant. He said editors and executives ended up taking Colford’s advice, which came with “a journalistic sensitivity and ethical integrity that won the confidence and respect of journalists and editors across the AP.”

Lauren Easton, whom Colford hired in a junior role, is now an AP vice president overseeing global communications. She said he was “a fierce defender of The Associated Press, always stepping up to advocate for press freedom, access and the importance of factual, nonpartisan journalism.”

Colford was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease while still at AP and kept working for a while before deciding to retire, his wife and friends said.

In retirement, he was delighted that the Briscoe Center for American History, housed at the University of Texas at Austin, acquired his trove of audiotapes, videos, photos, newspaper clippings and other materials from his journalism career. And he worked on his book, amassing a new batch of news clippings and other research in his home office in Trenton, N.J., said Gay, who visited him in June.

“Paul just never let go,” he said. “He was a dedicated, incredibly hardworking dude.”