Donald Moffitt, 88 years old, a retired news editor of The Wall Street Journal in New York who had lived in Williamsburg since 1999, died peacefully in the night in his home on February 11, 2025. His career in journalism and financial services spanned 46 years, beginning at the age of 16, when he joined the Houston Post as a copy boy.
Born Donald Anthony Moffitt on May 15, 1936, in Houston, Moffitt at the age of 17 became a reporter for the Houston Post, where his father was a photoengraver, and worked there during vacations from college at Yale University. He graduated from Yale in 1958 and joined The Wall Street Journal in 1960 in the paper’s Dallas news bureau, transferring to San Francisco in 1966.
With the late Art Sears, Jr., a native of Newport News and the Journal’s first black reporter, Moffitt shared a 1970 Mike Berger Award from Columbia University for reporting on New York City affairs. The two reporters wrote a series of stories on life in a poor black and Latino neighborhood in the Bronx borough of the city, where they had rented a room for a month and probed the difficult lives of residents. For the series, called “Kelly Street Blues” they were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Moffitt resigned from the Journal in 1983 and became an assistant managing editor of Forbes magazine, but returned to the Journal in 1985 as a news editor, supervising a staff of investigative and other reporters. He became one of the newspaper’s page-one editors in 1987 and retired at the end of 1990.
Moffitt’s widow, Ellen Graham, was also an editor at The Wall Street Journal. In 1975, the couple extended their European wedding trip to report on the plight of Greek and Turkish refugees in Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of the island, as part of a Wall Street Journal series on the swelling number of refugees around the world. After she retired in 1998, the couple moved from Connecticut to Williamsburg. Moffitt’s brother, David Moffitt, former superintendent of the Colonial National Historical Park, had retired there earlier. Donald Moffitt is survived by his wife, his brother, his daughter, and one grandchild, all of Williamsburg.
Moffitt enjoyed boating and especially fishing, which he took up in childhood, surf-casting at Galveston, Texas. He did research into his family history. He was a member of the Mory’s Association, New Haven, CT; the James City County Democratic Committee, and the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists.
His survivors ask contributions be made to that congregation, or to the American Civil Liberties Union.
