Dean Honeycutt, longtime Washington journalist who most recently had worked as a copy editor for the Washington Examiner, died Jan. 15 at his home in Burke, Va.
Honeycutt, 56, spent 25 years as an editor at the Washington Times, leaving in 2009 as its business editor.
In more recent years, he had also worked as managing editor of the subscription intelligence news service at Newsmax.com known as the Langley Intelligence Network Group and as managing editor of the Times’ start-up digital venture Times247.com.
A gentle man with a ready smile, Honeycutt had a passion for clear, strong writing and the finer points of English grammar. Armed with his ever-present Associated Press Stylebook — much of which he seemed to have memorized — and a trusty dictionary, he was the avowed expert on the Examiner’s house style rules.
An old-school copy editor, Honeycutt had the ability not only to root out errors and typos but to make copy more readable and understandable. Quietly and often without credit, he performed a valuable service not only to editors and writers but also thousands of readers of the Examiner, both in its previous incarnation as a daily tabloid newspaper and its current form as an all-politics website and weekly magazine.
Dean Curtis Honeycutt was born in 1958 in Paris, where his parents worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. His father, Sherman, a Marine who had been part of the brutal fighting on Okinawa, was an officer with the agency’s Near East desk. His mother, Arlene, was a CIA secretary. The couple returned to the U.S. the year after their son’s birth.
Honeycutt earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from James Madison University and a master’s degree in mass communications from the University of South Carolina, where he worked for the State newspaper in Columbia.
Thanks to a Rotary Foundation scholarship, he pursued postgraduate research in journalism at University College in Cardiff, Wales. Honeycutt traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East before returning to the U.S. in 1984 to take a job as a copy editor at the Washington Times, which had launched just two years before.
His first love was editing, but he also enjoyed playing tennis and coached youth soccer teams for the Annandale Boys and Girls Club. He drove a beloved Volkswagen Beetle and was a huge fan of auto racing.
He is survived by his wife of 23 years, Susana Fajure Honeycutt, formerly of Argentina; daughters Amanda and Tamara of Burke, Va., and brother Paul, a retired U.S. Navy commander who resides in San Diego.
Services were held Monday at Saint Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church in Fairfax.
