Tullio Peter David Mazzarella

David Mazzarella, a reporter, editor and newspaper executive for 45 years, died July 17, 2025, in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 87.
The cause of death was complications from a fall, according to the family.
Over the course of his career, Mazzarella was editor at four newspapers, including USA TODAY at a time when it was one of the most widely circulated daily newspaper in the United States. At various times he was also a foreign correspondent, a publisher, a regional circulation director and head of an international newspaper operation.
Mazzarella got his start in newspapering under what appeared to inauspicious circumstances. As a self-described nonconformist sophomore, he was suspended by Rutgers University for cutting classes, although he had made the dean's list the previous year. A friendly journalism professor suggested he apply for an opening at the weekly Cape May County (N.J.) Gazette. Mazzarella took the job as the paper's only reporter and, at 19, spent a year covering such things as county and municipal board meetings, traffic accidents, fires and high school sports. He delivered the paper to country stores every Thursday in a well-worn Ford coupe.
Returning to Rutgers the nextyear, Mazzarella became editor-in-chief of the campus daily, The Targum. After graduation, and another half-year with the Cape May weekly, he was hired by The Associated Press in its Newark, N.J., bureau in 1962 for 84 dollars a week. He soon became night editor.
Having asked for an overseas job, Mazzarella was transferred to the AP's World Services Desk in New York. A position opened in the Rome Bureau and Mazzarella was sent there in January 1966. He helped cover Italian politics and the Vatican as well as a coup, an earthquake and the world rowing championship in other countries for which the bureau had responsibility – Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia. He also helped cover the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states.
The following year Mazzarella became correspondent in charge of the AP's Lisbon, Portugal, bureau. He was the first to report that a stroke suffered by Portugal's then-dictator, Antonio Salazar, might prevent him from continuing in office. He then covered a sometimes tumultuous transition from one authoritarian regime to another less obviously authoritarian.
His most notable reporting in that year was from Biafra, the breakaway province that had started a civil war in Nigeria. The Portuguese and the Biafrans were on good terms and private flights, sometimes arranged by mercenaries and an order of Irish Roman Catholic priests, headed from Lisbon into Biafra regularly under cover of night.
Mazzarella made two weeks-long trips to Biafra on these flights and reported on the starvation and military stalemate that characterized the conflict at the time. At one point, Mazzarella was the only American newsman in the war zone, and his reporting reverberated in Congress and the United Nations, where calls for humanitarian aid echoed and were to some extent fulfilled. The war ended two years later. By that time, Mazzarella had been called back to Rome as news editor.
During this period, Mazzarella's son by his first wife, the former Kitty Uksti, fell ill with a brain tumor and died at 21 months of age. Afterward, Mazzarella felt the need to strike out in a different direction, resigning from the AP and becoming managing editor of Rome's local English-language newspaper, the Rome Daily American. He was in charge of editorial operations there for four years, inspiring a group of bright but inexperienced expatriates to embrace professional journalistic standards.
Mazzarella, his then-wife, and their three daughters returned to the United States in 1975. His first job back home was as foreign news editor of the Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C. He wrote a daily synopsis of foreign news for the Gannett company's scores of newspapers, as well as a weekly column on foreign affairs.
After one year, Gannett assigned Mazzarella to be editor of its Bridgewater, N.J., daily, The Courier-News, circulation around 60,000. There, he stressed enterprise and hard news, a formula he would carry to other newspapers later. In 1979 he was elevated from editor to publisher of the paper, a position he held until 1983. His interest never far from the newsroom, Mazzarella would occasionally help write headlines when the copy desk was short of staffers. One headline of Mazzarella's that brought both plaudits and groans in the newsroom topped a story about a New Jersey businessman who was rumored to be preparing to have a clone made of himself. The headline read: "New Jersey Businessman in Two-For-One Split."
In 1983 Gannett named Mazzarella USA TODAY general manager for New York, City, Connecticut and northern New Jersey, in charge of introducing the six-month-old national newspaper to the region. It was essentially a marketing and distribution job. The launch of the paper had not gone well in the New York area, with apathy on the part of potential readers and attacks on vending machines by disgruntled union activists. Mazzarella stabilized the sales effort in New York by catering to visitors to the city while neutralizing the strong-arm efforts to derail the launch. He did the latter by replacing vending machines almost as soon as they were defaced or destroyed. "We wore them down," Mazzarella would say of this struggle.
After two years, Mazzarella was appointed president of USA TODAY International, with a mandate to begin distribution of the paper abroad via satellite. This started with a print site in Singapore, for distribution in Asia, followed by one in Zurich, Switzerland, for distribution in Europe. Other print sites were eventually opened in Hong Kong, Frankfurt and London. The International Edition was circulated in all major capitals of East Asia, Western Europe and the Middle East.
While still in charge of the International Edition, Mazzarella was asked by Gannett Chairman Al Neuharth to direct an eight-month, 32-country tour by Neuharth and a team of reporters. It was called"JetCapade." Mazzarella was responsible, among other things, for lining up interviews with almost all of the heads of state or prime ministers in the target countries, including Fidel Castro of Cuba near the start of the journey and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom at the end. Excerpts appeared weekly in USA TODAY.
In 1994 Mazzarella was named the fourth top editor of USA TODAY, a position he held until his retirement in 1999. During his tenure, the paper emphasized hard news and enterprise and expanded coverage overseas. In an article for Brill's Content magazine on the improvements happening at that time at the paper, media critic Howard Kurtz suggested that Mazzarella may be "the best newspaper editor in America no one's ever heard of." At the same time TIME magazine listed USA TODAY as the "most improved newspaper" of the year. The American Journalism Review put a photo of Mazzarella on the cover over the headline: "USA TODAY Grows Up." A favorable writeup appeared inside. Mazzarella told the staff to regard such strong praise and sometimes equally strong criticism of the paper with equal skepticism. And also that all kudos of the paper were earned by the inspired work of its reporters and editors and photographers. Mazzarella retired in 1999, leaving to a younger generation the job of bringing USA T ODAY into the electronic newspaper age.
Mazzarella then became ombudsman for Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper within the U.S. Department of Defense. Its mission is to bring news and entertainment to U.S. servicemembers worldwide. The position of ombudsman was created by Congress in the 1990s to assure that the editors of the newspaper were not censored or otherwise pressured by military officers.
Mazzarella wrote many columns supporting the newspaper's First Amendment freedom-of-publication rights, as well as other columns dealing with issues readers had with the paper. He served as ombudsman both before and after a stint as the newspaper's editor, an appointment that occurred during a period of confusion during the tenures of some top editors. Stars and Stripes reporters won a number of awards for coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Mazzarella's given names were Tullio Pietro at birth on June 29, 1938, in Newark, N.J. He often told the story of how the nuns at his elementary school refused to call him Tullio because it derived from a historical pagan figure, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman orator and politician in the First Century B.C. Instead the nuns called him Peter, a Christian name. At Roman Catholic Confirmation Mazzarella chose the name David, and later would boast of ecumenically having a pagan name, a Christian name and a Hebrew name.
His parents, Pasquale and Benigna, emigrated to the United States in the early twenties from the same town in Italy, Mirabella Eclano, near Naples. Both worked in the clothing industry, Pasquale as a tailor for Howard Clothes in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Benigna as a seamstress in Newark factories. Benigna lived to 107, and Mazzarella wrote a book about her after she died called, Always Eat the Hard Crust of the Bread. The title derived from one of Benigna's often-quoted pieces of advice for healthful living. Some others: Physical activity, the Mediterranean diet, finding joy in work, and laughter.
Mazzarella is survived by his wife, Christine Wells, a former senior vice president of The Freedom Forum; his three daughters from his first marriage, Laura Mazzarella, Julie Geredien, and Lilianna Mazzarella; and his two grandchildren, Sarah and Max Eichorn, children of Laura's. He is predeceased by his brother Emil "Bud" Mazzarella and his sister Alba Logan.
A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, August 2, at 11:00 a.m. at Holy Rosary Church, 595 Third Street St. NW, Washington D.C. A reception at 12:00 noon at Casa italiana, 595 ½ Third Street NW, Washington, D.C., adjacent to Holy Rosary Church, will follow.
In lieu of flowers, a memorial contribution in David Mazzarella's name could be made to a special organization of the donor's choosing.