The cause was complications of prostate cancer, said his wife, Diana Naughton.

With his customary wryness, Mr. Naughton liked to say he had covered the political losers: the 1972 Democratic presidential campaigns of Senators Edmund S. Muskie and George McGovern, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew's resignation in 1973, President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate resignation in 1974, Gerald R. Ford's defeat in the 1976 presidential election, even a slice of Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency.

He also maintained that an occasional prank was essential to the spirit of journalism, and he enthusiastically abided by that belief, earning a reputation for twitting colleagues and candidates alike. He once popped up at a presidential news conference wearing the head of a chicken costume; another time, in Philadelphia, he had two motorcycles roar around his newsroom to liven things up. Good for morale, he said.

"Every news organization needs rules — they define the norms of our jobs," he said at a seminar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, where he was president from 1996 to 2003. "But every creative leader in a newsroom needs to know how and when to ignore the rules. Or wink at them. Or make fun of them."

Mr. Naughton joined The Times in 1969 and for eight years covered political campaigns, Congress and the White House, acquiring a reputation as a thorough, incisive reporter who also wrote magazine articles and news analyses. He covered Senator Muskie's emotional response in New Hampshire to a newspaper's published attack on his wife, Mr. Agnew's admission of tax evasion to avoid bribery charges, and the Congressional impeachment hearings that led to Mr. Nixon's humiliation in the Watergate scandal.

He also detailed the rise and fall of Mr. Ford, who succeeded Mr. Nixon as president but lost to Mr. Carter, having undercut his chances by pardoning Mr. Nixon in what critics called a back-room deal for the presidency. It was at a news conference during the Ford campaign that Mr. Naughton donned the giant chicken head. Mr. Ford was delighted.

"The thing about campaign pranks is that they are inside jokes, private relief from the mind-zapping routine of political journalism," Mr. Naughton wrote in Times Talk, a staff newsletter. "You go whipping across time zones in 20-hour days with itineraries like Richmond-Raleigh-Columbia-Pasadena, listening to candidates say things like, 'Give me your mandate.' "

James Martin Naughton was born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 13, 1938, the son of Francis and Martha Naughton. His father was a shipping company dispatcher on the Great Lakes. Mr. Naughton grew up in Painesville, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb; studied journalism at the University of Notre Dame, working summers as a reporter at The Painesville Telegraph; and graduated in 1960.

In the Marines for two years, he served in the Far East as a first lieutenant. He joined The Plain Dealer in Cleveland in 1962, covering politics and urban affairs there for seven years before moving on to The Times.

He and the former Diana Thomas were married in 1964. She survives him, as do his daughters, Jenifer Genovesi and Lara and Kerry Naughton; a son, Michael; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Naughton figured prominently in Timothy Crouse's book on the 1972 campaign press corps, "The Boys on the Bus." Mr. Crouse described him as soft-spoken and slightly built — "if Dickens' Tiny Tim had reached the age of thirty-four, he would look like Naughton" — and ambitious, hoping to take over Russell Baker's humor column in The Times. He displayed, Mr. Crouse wrote, a knack "for seeming to hold a casual conversation while really sucking out information like a bilge pump."

Mr. Naughton gave up reporting in 1977 and became an editor at The Inquirer at the behest of its editor, Gene Roberts, whose staff was on its way to winning 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years.

(Mr. Roberts was not spared from Mr. Naughton's pranks. In one, on Mr. Roberts's 46th birthday, Mr. Naughton and others acquired 46 bullfrogs from a farm and put them, croaking and springing, in Mr. Roberts's executive bathroom.)

Mr. Naughton held a number of senior editing positions at The Inquirer, including national-foreign editor, metropolitan editor, deputy managing editor, managing editor and, from 1991 to 1996, executive editor, the newsroom's No. 3 position at that time.

As national-foreign editor in the late '70s, he had almost no budget for foreign news, but he believed it was vital to keep a reporter, Richard Ben Cramer, in the Middle East nevertheless. He and Mr. Roberts managed to keep the correspondent there for a year with funds earmarked for things like building maintenance — and Mr. Cramer won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage.

Mr. Naughton was known for an allegiance to his reporters. He stopped the practice of having daily planning meetings by editors because, he said, reporters should determine what went into the paper, and he tried to give them the time, space and freedom to pursue compelling news, even if that meant shifting other priorities.

"The role of the manager," he said, "is to get the bureaucracy out of the way of the people going after a great story."

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.