Paul Colford, longtime journalist and author who became top AP spokesman, dies at 71

NEW YORK — Paul Colford, an inexhaustibly curious journalist and author who covered the media business for decades before seeing it from another vantage point as The Associated Press’ chief spokesperson, has died. He was 71.

Colford, who retired from the AP in 2017, died Aug. 26 after a fall the previous month turned a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease into a rapid decline, said his wife, Anne LaBate. Despite his health problems, he was working even in recent months on his third book, about a notorious figure from his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey.

During a decade as AP’s director and ultimately vice president of media relations, Colford was known for his sage, unflappable handling of the news cooperative’s dealings with other media outlets, from requests for interviews with its journalists to inquiries about its practices.

“Paul was both graceful and tough and believed completely in the AP’s journalists and their mission. That was important during some pretty tough moments, particularly when an AP journalist was hurt or worse,” said Kathleen Carroll, who was the news service’s executive editor from 2002 to 2016. She recalled Colford as “a talented and classy colleague” who loved journalism.

Colford knew the media ecosystem from the inside out and the outside in, having been a media reporter and columnist for the Daily News of New York, Newsday and the former New York Newsday. He covered magazines, book publishing, newspapers’ digital evolution and the new media of the dot-com era. Reporting on the radio landscape as conservative talk rose to prominence, Colford penned unauthorized biographies of Rush Limbaugh and shock jock Howard Stern.

“He just was indefatigable,” said longtime Newsday TV writer and critic Verne Gay, a colleague and friend of Colford’s. “He vacuumed everything up. He knew everything and everybody. And he constantly broke stories on the beat…. I was just in awe of him.”

Born Sept. 24, 1953, in Jersey City, Colford grew up there with seven siblings and graduated in 1975 from St. Peter’s University. He spent part of his college years studying in Turin, Italy, and still spoke Italian in phone calls with friends from that time, his wife said.

His early jobs included a stint at The Courier News of central New Jersey, where the couple met and dated for a time in the 1970s. He took her to the first Shakespeare in the Park production she ever attended, she recalled.

The relationship fizzled, Colford went on to New…