Ms. Kay helped shepherd Pulitzer-winning series, including the celebrated “Portraits of Grief” remembrances of the victims of 9/11.
Christine Kay, a veteran editor at The New York Times who had a strong hand in shaping prizewinning articles and investigative projects and who helped conceive “Portraits of Grief,” a celebrated series of remembrances about the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,2001, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 54.
Her brother-in-law Mark Kovac said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.
Ms. Kay was widely admired for deftly and tirelessly handling complex long-form journalism in The Times. But she was probably best known as a member of a team of editors and reporters that took on the challenge of reporting on those who died on 9/11, when hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa.
With its initial focus on Manhattan, The Times had little information about the victims to rely on. There was no authoritative list of people who had been in the World Trade Center, and, despite the scope of the attacks, a surge of survivors at hospital emergency rooms never materialized.
“I know people want to hear that we had this thoughtful conversation and sat in a room for three hours and came up with this magical approach,” Ms. Kay was quoted as saying by Roy J. Harris Jr. in his book “Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service” (2007). “But that is not what happened.”
The solution was crystallized with the appearance of a flurry of fliers and posters bearing the names and faces of missing people, which family members passed out in hospitals and posted on walls and store windows around the city. Two Times reporters, Janny Scott and Jane Gross, wrote about the phenomenon on Sept. 13.
“We had this fantastic raw material,” Ms. Scott said in a phone interview. She remembered suggesting that reporters call relatives listed on the fliers and write short sketches about the missing.
Fascinated by the fliers, Ms. Kay collected some at her desk and took them to a meeting on Sept.
