John Geddes, the former managing editor who played a key role in steering The New York Times through its transition to the digital age, died on Tuesday in a New York City hospital. He was 74. According to his wife, Jyll Holzman, a former senior vice president for advertising at The Times, his death was caused by lung disease related to medication he was taking for rheumatoid arthritis.

Geddes joined The New York Times in 1994 as business editor after a 13-year career at the Wall Street Journal, where he served as a correspondent and editor in Germany, as well as national editor in New York. In 1997, following the launch of nytimes.com, he was named deputy managing editor, and in 2003 he became managing editor for news operations. In this capacity, Geddes oversaw production, budgeting, and staffing during a period marked by declining print advertising and circulation, while The Times expanded its online presence.

Bill Keller, then executive editor and one of Geddes’s supervisors, described him as possessing “shrewd guidance,” “unfailing good humor,” and “mastery of just about everything.” Keller once remarked that Geddes was “the only person I know who could put out the entire New York Times by himself.”

In 2011, as the newspaper introduced its subscription-based paywall model, Geddes’s responsibilities broadened under executive editor Jill Abramson to include developing new digital initiatives alongside the company’s business executives. Abramson credited him as a “steady leader” during a difficult transition that involved layoffs and financial cuts before the paywall helped stabilize the publication’s revenue.

Dean Baquet, who succeeded Abramson, called Geddes “a terrific journalist” with a keen understanding of both the businesses The Times covered and its internal operations, describing him as “like a math major in a sea of English majors.” Geddes retired from The Times in 2013 after serving under four executive editors.

Born on November 19, 1951, in Providence, Rhode Island, Geddes earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Rhode Island in 1974 and a master’s in business journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. He began his career at the Ansonia Evening Sentinel in Connecticut and held various reporting and editing roles before joining the Wall Street Journal. He also led BIS Strategic Decisions, a market research firm acquired by his prior employer, Friday Holdings.

Following his retirement from The Times, Geddes served as managing editor for Bloomberg Politics, overseeing its 2016 election coverage, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in 2014.

Geddes is survived by his wife, Jyll Holzman, two children from a previous marriage, two sisters, a brother, and a grandson.

Throughout his career, Geddes maintained an optimistic view of journalism’s future. In 2009, he noted the willingness of audiences to pay for accurate information. He also expressed a pragmatic understanding of the newspaper’s role, rejecting the idea of The Times as an infallible “paper of record” but emphasizing the importance of striving to exceed the limitations imposed by time, resources, and knowledge.