She was a writer and a top editor at publications as diverse as The Nation, Vogue and Entertainment Weekly. She also helped found Grand Street and reboot Vanity Fair.
Elizabeth Pochoda, a journalist who widely traversed the media landscape of New York during her 50-year career, editing and writing for publications as diverse as The Nation, Vogue and The Daily News in New York, died on May 8 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 83.
Her death, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., was confirmed by her daughter, the novelist Ivy Pochoda.
Ms. Pochoda (pronounced pah-CO-da), who was known as Betsy, worked at fashion magazines (Mirabella and Vogue) and shelter magazines (House & Garden). She worked at general-interest publications (she was part of the team that relaunched Vanity Fair in the early 1980s) and at niche publications (The Magazine Antiques).
And she worked at publications with starkly different readerships, including the progressive magazine The Nation — from which she decamped for awhile to co-found the august literary magazine Grand Street — Entertainment Weekly, The New York Post and The Daily News.
Not that Ms. Pochoda had any patience with readership distinctions. “I don’t believe in different brows — high, low, middle,” she told Chicago Reader in 1993. “I believe if you write about things with the proper excitement, they’re accessible to everybody.”