By his own account, Bill Buchanan made the rounds during his 40-year career in Boston newspapers. “I’ve worn many hats in this business — office boy, general assignment reporter, overnight police reporter, TV-radio editor, rewrite man, assistant city editor, copy editor, jazz music writer, to name a few,’’ he wrote in 1982.

Writing obituaries held a special place and one drew the most response of anything in his career, even more than an award-winning story he wrote about living in Harlem for a week in 1964 not long after an off-duty white police lieutenant shot and killed an African-American teenager, setting off days of rioting.

In a sense, though, that obituary wasn’t really an obituary. Mr. Buchanan published it on the op-ed pages because “newspaper people must define at the most sensitive moments what news is and, in the obituary pages, what ‘prominence’ is,’’ he wrote in 1981. “It is often a difficult call. This woman never attended college and she did not work for pay before, during, or after her marriage.’’

And while “to be, simply, a devoted wife for 58 years and a loving mother for almost as long is not reason enough for a newspaper to run her obituary,’’ he wanted to highlight her life because “to her husband, her son, and her two granddaughters, she was quite special. I know this because she was my mother.’’

Mr. Buchanan, whose career included covering the 1950 Brink’s robbery and becoming one of the early newspaper critics to make TV appearances, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease Nov. 15 in an Oviedo, Fla., nursing home. He was 90.

At Boston newspapers including the Herald Traveler, the Herald, the Daily Record, and the Globe, Mr. Buchanan earned the admiration of his peers.

“Bill Buchanan was a newspaperman who was proud to call himself just that, no glosses. In fact it was a wide-ranging versatility on the job that was his hallmark in his 40 years in Boston journalism,’’ said Thomas Mulvoy, a former Globe managing editor, who added: “General assignment reporter, feature writer, radio-TV columnist, obituary writer, and, finally, news desk copy editor, where his attention to detail had great effect, Bill served his chosen profession well.’’

Mr. Buchanan also left an uncommonly personal record, writing about his life in first-person accounts that appeared through the years, and he had an uncanny ability to be present as history unfolded.

“Sure, I remember when they robbed Brink’s in the North End. I was working at headquarters that night,’’ he wrote in 1973 of the police reporting days at his career’s outset.

Long before televisions were in every home, Mr. Buchanan was a TV critic in the 1950s when “the industry was still sparkling new. Television was on everyone’s mind,’’ he recalled in 1981. “People were talking about it at the bus stop and in restaurants. They’d stand in front of a department store and gaze at TV if only the test pattern were on.’’

While he loved jazz and befriended some of his favorite musicians, he also covered Bob Dylan’s legendary performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, writing afterward that “his whimsical yet stern approach keeps you watching him and listening, and it is not until he is finished that you realize that he desperately needs a haircut.’’

For some assignments, however, Mr. Buchanan wrote about people many readers would as soon forget. “One night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., 33 prostitutes were arrested in the Bay Village, Combat Zone, and Park Square areas,’’ he wrote in 1982, after spending a week with Boston police detectives. “They were booked, bailed, and appeared in court the next morning, and were back doing business as usual the following night.’’

Mr. Buchanan’s daughter Barbara Laronde of Walpole recalled that he “took it as a huge responsibility to write about how things were. He so loved writing and always thought he was so fortunate to see different sides of life.’’

An only child, William Buchanan was born in Boston and grew up in Milton. As a boy, he began a lifelong “love affair with Lake Winnipesaukee’’ when his parents sent him in 1937 to what was then Camp Samoset in Gilford, N.H., where he won ribbons in swimming, track, and marksmanship that he saved all his life.

He was a senior at Milton High School when the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire set him on a path to becoming a reporter. “I heard much of the drama unfold as I listened to my police radio at home on that Saturday night — Nov. 28, 1942,’’ he wrote in the Globe 45 years later.

“There were the pleas of officers radioing to headquarters: ‘Get us more help down here . . . We have hundreds still trapped . . . God, it’s terrible,’ ’’ he wrote.

He graduated from Northeastern University, where he studied journalism, and married June Whelpley. They had two daughters, before their marriage ended in divorce.

Mr. Buchanan later was married to the former Audrey Lewis for 40 years. She died in 2013.

On Memorial Day in 1948, he began his reporting career at the Herald Traveler, and through the years occasionally also worked at various radio stations.

“I’ve talked with mayors, police captains and patrolmen, disc jockeys and jazzmen, murderers and pickpockets, junkies and narcotics dealers, hung out with pimps and prostitutes, covered football games and cross-country races, written about cat shows and parades, and covered fatal accidents and train wrecks,’’ he wrote in 1973, looking back at 25 years in the business.

“Bill seemed to carry a sense of Boston history around with him,’’ said Don Aucoin, the Globe’s theater critic, who worked with Mr. Buchanan on the copy desk in the late 1980s. “He had sort of a mischievous twinkle in his eye all the time. He was very professional and good at his job, but he believed that newspapering should be fun, and he brought that spirit to his job at night.’’

A service has been held for Mr. Buchanan, who in addition to his daughter Barbara leaves another daughter, Linda Rich of Longwood, Fla.; a stepdaughter, Margot Lewis of New York City; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

A stickler for accuracy — woe be the reporter who called a street an avenue or a road a street — Mr. Buchanan saved a career’s worth of articles and correspondence in a pair of four-drawer file cabinets.

“He had a huge postcard collection — postcards not only from family members, but from people he had worked with, people he had written articles about, and people who heard him on the radio,’’ Linda said.

He also sent postcards of praise to former colleagues, using playful pen names that never really disguised the fact that they were from Mr. Buchanan. One to Aucoin “read ‘Keep up the good work!’ and was signed, ‘Mrs. McGillicuddy, Hingham mother of three.’ ’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.