NEW YORK — Walter E. Mattson, a former president and chief operating officer of The New York Times, who helped transform the newspaper with innovative labor agreements and new technologies, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 84.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, his wife, Geraldine Mattson, said. He had been living in a retirement home.
A detail-oriented production executive, Mr. Mattson was a tough, shirt-sleeves decision maker who preferred pressrooms and composing rooms to the executive suite. He had once been a printer, and while he had degrees in accounting, engineering, and advanced management, he cultivated a working-class persona.
Mr. Mattson was a production assistant at The Boston Herald Traveler in the 1950s. After earning an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University in 1959, he joined the Times in 1960 as an assistant production manager.
Before retiring, he was a forceful advocate of the Times’s purchase of The Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion, a transaction criticized in leaner years.
In 2013, the Times sold the Globe and its other New England media properties to John W. Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $70 million.
Mr. Mattson became a vice president of the Times in 1970, attended summer advanced management programs at Harvard Business School, and within three years was general manager, in charge of all business, marketing, circulation, personnel, and production operations.
For much of the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Mattson was a right-hand man to the Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a corporate equivalent of A.M. Rosenthal, the paper’s editor.
Mr. Mattson negotiated labor contracts, spearheaded automation to replace production workers, diversified company media holdings, helped to revolutionize the paper’s appearance. and pushed technology to extend its circulation to readers across the nation.
In their 1999 book, “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times,’’ Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones said that Sulzberger had long had his eye on Mr. Mattson as president of the company.
Walter Edward Mattson Jr. was born in Erie, Pa., on June 6, 1932, to Walter Mattson and the former Florence Anderson.
After two years in the Marine Corps, he worked nights as a printer at The Portland Press Herald while attending Portland Junior College and then Portland University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business and accounting in 1955.
He married Geraldine Anne Horsman in 1953. In addition to his wife, he leaves two sons, Stephen and William; a daughter, Carol Heylmun; a sister, Norene Hastings; eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
