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When a group of editors and reporters congregated for lunch last month in a conference room several floors above the Times newsroom, it was a bittersweet moment. It was an occasion to grant an award to a business journalist who exemplifies professional excellence and exceptional character. It was also a reminder of the shocking loss of someone with precisely those attributes.

The room in which we gathered is named for him: Nathaniel C. Nash.

Nathaniel joined the paper in 1973 as a recently minted Harvard graduate who had majored in languages. His path to the Times newsroom came from an unlikely turn. At a Bible study gathering he periodically attended when in New York, he encountered a Times reporter named McCandlish Phillips, who spoke of his work in journalism with such passion that Nathaniel came to feel the same calling.