PETER KAPLAN

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In his long career, Peter Kaplan was perhaps best known for the 15 years he spent as editor in chief of The New York Observer.

For much of that time his staff was crammed into the fourth floor of an East 64th Street townhouse that may or may not have been zoned for business use. The mood of the Wednesday-morning story meetings he led was somewhere between that of “The Front Page” and “Duck Soup.” He had a deep knowledge of screwball comedies, the Yankees, F.D.R. He believed Tyson Chandler would save the Knicks. He had theories about Obama, Brad Pitt, Shonda Rhimes. He preferred diners to four-star restaurants.

Kaplan loved print, right down to what he once called “the majesty of the dragon of the printing press itself, with its roar and black ink issue.” And he loved being part of journalism’s wobbly transition to the Internet, though he insisted that The Observer’s website be filled with reporting, not blogging. “It’s the catalytic combination of sensibility, aesthetic, storytelling, reporting and morality that matters,” he wrote in his introduction to an anthology of Observer writings.

We had the good fortune to be Kaplan’s executive editors at The Observer. About four years ago we started our parody Twitter accounts (@CrankyKaplan, @wise_kaplan and @real_kaplan, to name three). He never seemed to mind our cockeyed homage. “It’s a little bit like being Jack Benny,” he told Slate. “You have this staff writing you.”