at a 1964 press conference After earning his master's degree from Columbia in 1947, Pressman worked for a short period as a journalist for the
Newark Evening News. Columbia then awarded him a
Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and he spent the next 15 months in Europe as a freelance journalist, contributing feature stories for various outlets, including the Overseas News Agency (a subsidiary of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency). In 1948, he was briefly arrested in
Berlin while in the
Soviet sector of the city, in what was reported to be a sign of increasing hostilities from the Soviet government toward the west. He was headed to the Polish Consulate Berlin when he was detained, but was released two hours later. Among the events he covered in Europe was the 1949
show trial of Cardinal
József Mindszenty, who opposed the communist regime of the new
Hungarian People's Republic, which Pressman covered for
The New York Times and for
Edward R. Murrow's radio program. Later that evening he reported from darkened Times Square and interviewed a New York City patrolman about the somber mood in the area. Pressman was co-anchor (with
Bill Ryan) of New York's first early-evening half-hour newscast, the
Pressman-Ryan Report, born out of a devastating 1963 New York City-area newspaper strike. He covered the New York region for
NBC News,
WNBC-TV and
WNBC-AM radio. He was sent by the network to report on many historic events, including the 1956 sinking of the
Andrea Doria,
Elvis Presley's Army stint which went through
Brooklyn, one-on-one interviews with
Marilyn Monroe,
Harry S. Truman and
Fidel Castro, the 1964 arrival of the
Beatles at
Kennedy Airport, the assassination of
Malcolm X, chasing after newly inaugurated New York mayor
John Lindsay in the streets during the
1966 transit strike, the
1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he reported on the
clashes between demonstrators and police, and the aftermath of the assassinations of
John F. Kennedy,
Robert F. Kennedy and
Martin Luther King Jr. His reputation as an intrepid reporter is the subject of a gentle lampoon on a recording of
Bob and Ray ("The Two and Only,"
Columbia Records, c. 1970). A reporter billed as "Gabe Pressman" was played by actor J.D. Cullum in
Billy Crystal's
HBO film
61*, reporting unfavorably on the baseball exploits of
Roger Maris (played by
Barry Pepper). He was a past president of the
New York Press Club, from 1997 to 2000, and as head of that organization fought for the rights of New York's journalists, both print and electronic. Up until the time of his death in June 2017, Pressman still worked part-time at WNBC, mostly as a blog writer about New York City news on the station's website, and he was active on
Twitter. In 2014, he stated that it was an arthritic knee that kept him from chasing stories like he used to. ==Personal life==