A Friend of the Truth

Jerrold Ballinger, who covered everything from espionage to direct marketing during a long and distinguished reporting career, died Feb. 28 of cancer at 77.

The news saddened direct marketers and colleagues.

“Jerry was a good friend to me and a good friend of direct marketing,” said Ron Jacobs, president of Jacobs & Clevenger. “And at the end of the day, he was a good friend of the truth.”

Jack Baer, of Muldoon & Baer, hailed Ballinger as “a true voice of reason.”

A Bronx native, Ballinger started his journalistic career in the U.S. Army, where as a young private he interviewed future president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Later, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, covering everything from jazz to crime.

Asked how he could report on such a wide variety of subjects, Ballinger answered, “A good reporter can cover anything.”

He would later amuse younger colleagues by telling them of the city desk editor who demanded a middle initial with each name.

“And you'd better not tell him that the person didn't have a middle name,” Ballinger would laugh.

After several years at the Plain Dealer, Ballinger moved on to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also worked on the sports desk of the New York Daily News, and as an editor at Fairchild Publishing. In the latter role, he found himself imposing the standards he learned at the Plain Dealer on star columnists.

In 1971, Ballinger entered the book field, co-authoring “The Shattered Silence” with Zwy Aldouby. It was the story of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who infiltrated the Syrian government.

The book — a narrative following Cohen from Egypt to Israel to Argentina to Syria, where he was eventually discovered and hanged — was published by Coward, McCann & Geohegan and reviewed favorably by New York Sen. Jacob Javits.

Ballinger began writing for DM News as a freelancer in 1983, and joined the paper full-time when it went weekly in 1990. He became known for writing detailed database marketing case histories, and for handling complex and controversial stories with unusual accuracy and sensitivity.

“Jerry was that rarity — a good man and real gentlemen who was always genuinely interested in what you had to say, not just because he was a reporter but because he had respect for the people he interacted with,” said Katie Muldoon, of Muldoon & Baer. “You knew that Jerry was really listening and would get it right.”

“The nice thing about Jerry is that he's not cynical about the business,” Chuck Tannen, the founding editor of Catalog Age, said during the 1990s.

In 1988, Ballinger's article “What Ever Happened to the Kitchen Table Startup?” was a finalist in the New York Business Press Editors awards competition. He wrote it for Catalog Business, a sister publication of DM News.

In 1991, he scored a national scoop by reporting that several catalogers were threatening to drop the American Express card because of what they deemed unreasonably high fees. His article was sourced by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and many other papers.

Ron Jacobs described Ballinger as “a sort of everyman newspaper guy from another era. He could talk to CEOs as easily as he could do everything else.”

According to Jacobs, Ballinger met the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach during a DMA event and engaged him in a lengthy conversation. “Jerry knew my father lives in Mexico, so he introduced me,” Jacobs said. “The next thing I know, I'm a friend of this world-famous writer, and Jerry had been his friend for 20 minutes.”

Ballinger retired in 1995 but did occasional freelance articles for Direct. In retirement, he wrote poetry and fiction. A resident of New York's Greenwich Village, he had a wide circle of friends from all walks of life.

He is survived by a sister, Ruth Shavelson of Fort Lee, NJ.