Robert Aitken Potts of West Tisbury died at home on Saturday night, Oct. 11, with his wife of 50 years, Marjory, beside him. He was 84.

The cause of death was complications from a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

A former longtime television news reporter for NBC, CBS and PBS, Mr. Potts had a brief stint as news director for radio station WMVY when he and his wife moved to West Tisbury permanently in 1981. They later became documentary filmmakers, and in 1985 won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for their film You May Call Her Madame Secretary, about the life and work of Frances Perkins who served as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But Robert Potts was perhaps best known in more recent years in West Tisbury as the campaigning, humorous, watchdog editor and publisher of The Broadside, a weekly newspaper that sold for “one thin dime” at Alley’s General Store and Conroy’s. The self-published sheet was filled with community news, regular accounts from selectmen’s meetings, personal asides and witticisms from the editor. Gross annual revenues were about $900 a year. “It’s self indulgent,” he told the Gazette in an interview in 2007. “Journalists should always be disciplined and take their lumps. But with The Broadside, I can do anything I want.”

And at times he did. In 2003 he stopped attending selectmen’s meetings and stopped publishing The Broadside in protest over the way the executive secretary was forced out of her job. Six months later he was back in business at the urging of friends and readers.

“I would like to do just about any newspaper job,” Mr. Pott told the Gazette. “Except being the layout guy for the Port Jefferson Herald — that I wouldn’t want to do.”

The Broadside ceased publication with its 428th edition in March 2012, as Mr. Potts’s health declined.

Funeral services and a memorial to his life will be held in West Tisbury on Nov. 9.

More information and a full obituary will appear in a future edition of the Gazette.