SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) – Carroll F. Robbins, who spent more than five decades as a reporter, columnist and editor for newspapers in this western Massachusetts city, died Sunday. He was 83.

Robbins retired in 1991 as executive editor of the Union-News, now known as The Republican.

He was named to that post in 1987, when the Springfield Morning Union merged with the afternoon Springfield Daily News, of which Robbins was editor. As the first executive editor of the new Union-News, he melded the staffs. Robbins had joined the Springfield Daily News as a political reporter in 1952.

“Carroll Robbins was the very model of the news executive, a professional, trained to sort out the difference between news and nonsense, between special interest and public interest, between fact and fiction, between knowledge and guesswork,” said David Starr, president of The Republican. “He felt that it was his mission to leave the community he lived in a little better than he found it. He succeeded.”

“He was an outstanding editor and writer and a tenacious political reporter, and I respected him immensely,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Massachusetts. “He’ll be greatly missed.”

Wayne E. Phaneuf, current executive editor of The Republican, who began working under Robbins at the former Daily News in 1969, called Robbins “a newsman in the purist form.”

“He spent a lifetime telling the story of this community in the pages of this newspaper and inspiring many of us along the way,” Phaneuf said.

Robbins began his journalism career after high school as the sports editor of his hometown paper, the Norwood Daily Messenger. Following graduation from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst he wrote for the former Holyoke Transcript-Telegram before joining the Daily News.

At the time of his death, he was editor of a newsletter at the Reeds Landing retirement community in Springfield.

Survivors include his second wife, Jean Vivian; four children, including Carolyn Robbins-Chipkin, editorial writer for The Republican, and 10 grandchildren. His first wife, Rose B. Robbins died in 2001.

A funeral will be held Wednesday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow.