At times it was as though Mr. Ziff demanded the best of Royko and Frost from aspiring journalists, newspaper work that was at once soaring and fierce.

“Howard was part Chicago precinct captain and part Amherst College philosophy professor,’’ Norman Simms, whom Mr. Ziff hired to teach at UMass Amherst, told B.J. Roche in 1998 for a UMass Magazine profile of Mr. Ziff, occasioned by his retirement.

Mr. Ziff majored in philosophy at Amherst College, a background that could be seen in everything from his journalism ethics courses to the way he mused about the business.

Ultimately, though, words and sentences mattered most, regardless of the technology used to deliver the news.

“I don’t think that good writing will ever go away,’’ Mr. Ziff said in the UMass Magazine profile. “That’s impossible. You’ve got to think and reflect, and you don’t know what you think until you’ve written it.’’

Mr. Ziff was born in Holyoke, the youngest of three children whose father owned a curtain company. Even when he was young, Mr. Ziff’s prodigious memory drew notice.

“He had an amazing ear,’’ said his daughter, Ellen of Amsterdam. “He thought the point was to memorize everything on the page, and he remembered everything. When he had his bar mitzvah, they gave him jazz records and they gave him opera records. He could recognize the nationality of an orchestra by its sound. In his jazz phase, he could tell you what session it was.’’

That ear was just as valuable when he became a journalist.

“He could listen to what people said in ways not everybody could do,’’ his daughter said.

After graduating from Amherst College in 1951, he went to Columbia University in New York City briefly for graduate work in philosophy, but left because he did not like the direction his academic discipline was taking in those years.