Mitchel R. Levitas, a journalist who won the prestigious George Polk Award in his 20s for a series on labor racketeering and held leading newsroom positions at The New York Times for decades, died on Saturday at his home in New Marlborough, Mass. He was 89.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease complicated by pneumonia, his son Daniel said.

In a series of appointments from 1976 to 1995, Mr. Levitas oversaw The Times’s metropolitan coverage and edited The Week in Review section, The New York Times Book Review, the weekend edition of the paper and the Op-Ed page.

A native New Yorker and product of the city’s public schools and colleges, he joined the newspaper in 1965 as a writer and editor with The New York Times Magazine. He retired 37 years later, in 2002, as editorial director of book development, a post in which he inaugurated volumes on the best travel writing by Times reporters and anthologies of Times reportage on great historical events.

He continued to serve as a consultant to that office until 2014.

Mr. Levitas, who was known as Mike, was a sharp-eyed editor. According to an article in The Book Review in 1975 by the editor and writer Victor Navasky, it was Mr. Levitas, as an assistant metropolitan editor, who instinctively assigned a reporter, Nicholas Gage, to investigate the authenticity of “The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano.” The book was being billed as a personal memoir dictated by the Mafia boss himself.