Leo Bogart, who died Saturday at 84, was a sociologist and an expert in polling and other statistical methodologies who was widely regarded as the “dean of newspaper research,” in the words of the Newspaper Research Journal.

As the research director for nearly three decades at the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, Bogart introduced modern techniques to determine who readers were and what they wanted. His research is widely credited with spurring the introduction of new sections and special graphics.

Prior to his newspaper research, Bogart was a market researcher for a number of large companies, including Standard Oil. When the quiz show scandals brought congressional hearings in 1959, he was able to reassure Revlon founder Charles Revson that Revlon’s public image remained untainted, despite its being implicated in the fixing of “The $64,000 Question.”

Bogart grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and attended Erasmus Hall High School. His father had been a jurist in Odessa in the Ukraine, but found it hard to make ends meet in America, despite occasional college teaching jobs. At Brooklyn College, Bogart edited the school paper before being called up for service in the Army Signal Corps and Signal Intelligence during World War II. In his wartime memoir, “How I Earned the Ruptured Duck,” Bogart recalled encountering slave laborers in Germany who were “fed on rotten cabbages and flogged like animals.”

He was billeted for a time in a so-called “home for idiot children” which was actually used for murdering inmates. His wartime experiences affected him deeply; he wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago on the American Jewish Response to the Holocaust. Much later, in 1991, he revealed in an article in Commentary that an eminent German demographer and visiting professor at Chicago had never repudiated her anti-Semitic writings she produced under the Nazis.

After receiving a doctorate in sociology at Chicago in 1948, he immediately married. His wife, Agnes, who survives him, said she refused to live in the Quonset hut that had become the typical graduate student dorm due to the crush of students in the wake of the war. Bogart moved to New York, where Agnes worked as a newspaper editor for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. When Bogart took a job with Standard Oil, he forbade her to mention her job to his employers. Bogart got his first taste of market research by investigating how Esso’s sponsorship of weekend radio music programs affected the public’s perception of the brand. Bogart also lectured at New York University and worked on a study in preparation of the integration of Army personnel.

In 1951, Bogart spent a year in France studying Algerian immigration as a Fulbright research fellow. When he returned to America, he worked first for the advertising agency McCann-Erickson, and then as the director of market research for Revlon.

In 1960, he became executive vice president of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, where he initiated programs to show advertisers how to use newspapers more effectively. He studied how newspaper ads were read and their impact on customers. The research was incorporated into “Strategy in Advertising” (1967).

Bogart published 11 books in all, starting with his prophetic “The Age of Television” (1957), in which he extrapolated from current trends to predict declines in movie and sports attendance and novel reading. “To judge from Leo Bogart’s findings,” wrote the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, “few people will have time to read his book.”

He also published several books on the media and public opinion, including “Silent Politics” (1972), republished as “Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion” (1985); “Press and Public” (1981); “Preserving the Press” (1985), and, most recently, “Over the Edge: How the Pursuit of Youth by Marketers and the Media Has Changed American Culture” (2005). The change he detected in American culture, a coarsening, was dramatic and for the worse. In America, the Reverend Andrew Greeley wrote, “‘Over the Edge’ will provide useful homily material for those clerics, of whatever persuasion, who want to denounce the media and the consumerism, materialism, commodification, paganism, secularism, etc., etc. of American society.”

He continued to read several newspapers daily and was still trying to figure out how to keep them relevant to readers and afloat in an environment in which advertising dollars often flow to other media. A 2004 article he wrote for the Newspaper Research Journal addressed the question of measuring newspaper quality. “Whatever the criteria they use,” Bogart wrote, “the conclusion is clear: A newspaper’s investment in its news operation is likely to yield a solid return.”

Bogart retained a lifelong habit of frugality, and regularly walked from his home on West 56th Street to the Battery, into his 80s. He slowed down only after contracting his final illness, babesiosis, a deer tick-borne parasite. Just prior to his death, he was re-reading Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” in the original German.

Leo Bogart
Born September 23, 1921; died October 16 of the effects of babesiosis, at Mount Sinai Medical Center; survived by his wife, Agnes, children Michele and Gregory, and one grandchild.