Mike Feinsilber fought the epic AP-UPI rivalry from both camps with wit and grace WFTV [Video]

WASHINGTON — (AP) — Mike Feinsilber, whose masterful way with words and mischievous wit enlivened American journalism for five decades, the bulk of them at The Associated Press, died Monday. He was a month shy of 90.

Feinsilber died at home, said his wife of 55 years, Doris Feinsilber, a pioneering computer programmer at the CIA. “He was doing poorly, but was not in pain,” she said.

Feinsilber’s career was rooted in the wire services and their epic rivalry — working first for United Press International, then for the AP. But he never embodied the just-the-facts stereotype of that trade, though he was as fast as any in the competition to be first.

He wrote with elegance, style, authority, brevity and a gentle playfulness, all in service of finding the humanity in things.

Feinsilber covered a Pennsylvania mine collapse where three trapped miners were rescued. He covered Saigon in the …