His daughter Melissa Meyer said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
With a career spanning the latter half of the 20th century and several years into the 21st, Mr. Meyer was at the center of a revolution within the craft and business of journalism — a revolution that, to a large degree, he helped shape.
When he began working as an assistant editor at The Topeka Daily Capital in Kansas in the mid-1950s, computers were room-size, turtle-speed contraptions, and reporting was done mostly through interviews, with the occasional trip to the library or the government records office.
Mr. Meyer was among the few reporters who saw the growing power of computers to crunch data and produce new insight into complex questions.
His breakthrough came in 1967, in the aftermath of the Detroit riot that summer. Mr. Meyer, by then a national correspondent for The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, had spent the previous year at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship for journalists, intending to study how pollsters used computers to manipulate data.
Instead, he realized the possibility of using computers in his own work. He took courses, learned code and even devoted time to using an IBM mainframe computer.
He went to The Detroit Free Press, which, like The Beacon Journal, was a Knight-Ridder paper, as a favor to the editor, who said that his own reporters were exhausted and he needed fresh bodies.
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