Deborah Howell, a trailblazing newspaper editor who led the innovative Washington bureau of the Newhouse News Service before serving as ombudsman of the Washington Post, died Jan. 2 in an accident near Blenheim, New Zealand. She was 68.
She was on vacation with her husband when she stepped out of a car to take a photograph. She was struck by an oncoming automobile. In New Zealand, drivers use the left side of the road, and her husband said he thought she looked the wrong way.
Ms. Howell, who published two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects when she was a top editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was a powerful presence in American journalism and was a particularly inspirational figure to women in a field long dominated by men.
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