Joel P. Rawson, retiring April 29, has held editing jobs at The Journal for more than three decades.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

Joel P. Rawson, who inspired a generation of Providence Journal reporters to embrace nonfiction storytelling, a novelistic style of print journalism that he helped introduce and perfect, is retiring on April 29 as the newspaper’s senior vice president and executive editor. Rawson, 64, who lives in Burrillville with Janeen, his wife of 40 years, intends to pursue his passions: flying and writing.

Rawson worked for The Journal in a variety of editing posts for 34 years, becoming executive editor in 1996, the year The Journal Co. was sold to Belo Corp. of Dallas, which earlier this year spun off the A.H. Belo Corp. as a separate newspaper company. The final years of Rawson’s tenure were marked by momentous and sometimes painful changes in journalism, in Rhode Island and nationally.

Under Rawson’s leadership, The Journal won scores of local, regional and national awards. The paper was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service category for its coverage of the 2003 Station nightclub fire. The Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1994, when Rawson was deputy executive editor.

But the better measure of Rawson’s impact on modern journalism may be his contribution to the art of nonfiction narrative, a form he embraced and helped develop beginning in the 1970s, when he was the paper’s Sunday editor. Writers and editors he influenced now work at many of the nation’s leading media outlets.

“People will tell you that he’s the best editor of narrative journalism they’ve known, and they’re right. Others will tell you that he has the best eye for a story of any editor they’ve known, and they’re right, too. And still others will talk about his nose for hard news, revelatory investigations, and they’re right about that, too,” said Mark Silverman, who worked for Rawson at The Journal in the 1980s and is now editor and vice president of content and audience development for The Tennessean, in Nashville.

“He knew how to instill excitement in the craft of nonfiction writing; how to make what happened in, say, the Lower Arctic section of West Warwick seem as relevant and as dynamic as anything occurring in Manhattan or in Boston,” said Dan Barry, who was a member of The Journal’s 1994 Pulitzer-winning team and is now with The New York Times. “I wrote a magazine piece once, about a particularly troubling arson case in Providence, and he sent me an encouraging note. The note pretty much changed my life.”

Rawson’s signature impact was first felt more than 30 years ago, when he assigned staff writer Bruce Butterfield, who later moved to The Boston Globe, to write “The one defines all the others,” a front-page Sunday feature about Route 95. Published on Aug. 31, 1975, the piece depicted the highway as more of a character –– or characters –– than a ribbon of asphalt.

Rawson recalled asking Butterfield to consider Route 95, which runs the length of the state, as “its own Mississippi River with its own Huck Finn, its own stories.” Readers were intrigued –– if also, perhaps, initially puzzled — by this unconventional approach. “People wondered if I was out of my mind,” Rawson said, “but they liked it.”

The piece indeed told a story, but it lacked drama and narrative arc, vital elements of many of the best novels, short stories and movies. Rawson introduced those elements six months later with another Butterfield story, “Life was good for four people who died on a quiet afternoon.” Published on Feb. 15, 1976, it chronicled the last hours of four people whose fates tragically intersected one dark day in Jamestown.

The story was the first example of what came to be known as the “Rawson Recreation,” a story told by reconstructing, through interviews and other sources, the complexities of an event or events that would have been covered more fleetingly, if at all, in a hard news story. Over the next 32 years, hundreds of such stories illustrated by award-winning photographs were published by The Journal.

“Joel introduced narrative storytelling techniques to The Journal and taught me and other reporters and editors how to apply them with rigid adherence to journalistic standards,” said Butterfield, who is now an author and assistant professor at Suffolk University in Boston. “It is a form now embraced at many major newspapers and taught at such places as the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. But Joel was ahead of his time, and for years Providence Journal readers were treated to in-depth articles and award-winning articles unlike any they had seen before.”

No editor of a major metropolitan newspaper is without critics, and Rawson had his, both within the newspaper and outside. He could be moody and aloof; he played favorites. He could have a temper, especially in his earlier years when he would regularly climb onto his desk and scream. He frequently filled the news-planning meetings over which he presided with his personal and sometimes quirky observations of life –– and with his doodling, typically of airplanes and jets. Outsiders complained that he was inaccessible, and rarely available to comment to other publications that were writing about The Journal.

After graduation from the University of Maine and a tour of duty in Vietnam, where he was an Army reconnaissance pilot, Rawson joined the paper as a night copy editor in 1971. Except for three years in the late 1980s, when he became the managing editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, Rawson spent his entire career at The Journal. In his later years, he, like editors elsewhere, witnessed downsizing of news staff and diminishment of resources driven by the corporate bottom line.

“It’s been difficult for almost everybody,” Rawson said. “It’s not how you want to end a career. You want to end a career building something, and, in the end, what we were doing was managing its decline and that’s not a hell of a lot of fun.”

Still, Rawson predicts that newspapers will endure, although in what form remains to be seen.

“I don’t think the medium is going away. I don’t think the demand for responsible, thorough reporting and storytelling and local markets is going away.”

Thomas E. Heslin, managing editor for new media, will succeed Rawson for the immediate future. A national search for a permanent successor has been launched, according to Howard G. Sutton, Journal publisher, president and chief executive officer. Sutton said Heslin is a “strong candidate” for the job.

Sutton praised Rawson as “the consummate professional” and a “passionate communicator.” The publisher said: “His legacy will not only be his body of work over 37 years, but also the indelible mark that he made on hundreds of journalists, now all over America, as their coach, teacher and mentor. We’ll all miss him.”

Carol J. Young, deputy executive editor who has worked closely with Rawson for 25 years, praised his leadership and his vision of the newspaper’s role as a government watchdog. “Joel will be remembered for inspiring a new kind of writing; but his legacy also includes fostering investigative work, an unbending loyalty to the newsroom, elevating the work of photographers, and relentlessly fighting for access to public records, to public places and to public meetings,” Young said.

“Working for Joel has been no walk in the park. Joel set the bar high and he expected us to reach it, or at least to die trying,” she said. “He was a motivational force. Everyone — reporters, editors, photographers — wanted to perform in a way that met his expectations.”

Said Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Florida-based Poynter Institute, America’s premier school for working journalists: “The reporters who worked with Joel turned him into a legend, the kind of editor who could jump over a desk to make a point about how human character intersects with the news. Because of Joel and other leaders at the paper, The Journal became known for tough reporting, good writing, and — one of those rarest of birds — a learning newsroom.”

Said Barry, who since leaving The Journal has written two books and was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer prize in feature writing for The New York Times: “As for his impact on journalism overall, all I can say is that when people learn that I worked at The Providence Journal, they often ask me whether I know Joel Rawson. I am always proud to say: ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ ”

Rawson owns two airplanes and will fly more often after leaving The Journal. He will spend time with his family: his wife, four children and four grandchildren. He will write. Having completed four novels, he is returning to the form he championed at The Journal: narrative nonfiction.

“Our desire to make sense of the world by telling each other stories, by relating the experience, is not going to go away,” he said.

gwmiller@projo.com