Doll, Julie

Born in Garden City, Kansas, in 1957, Julie Doll grew up with nine sisters and seven brothers on the family’s farm in Finney County.

She attended Garden City High School, where she served as student council president and participated in track, volleyball and band and worked on the high school paper, The Sugar Beet.

She attended Kansas State University, where her time at the K-State Collegian sparked an interest in journalism as a career. After graduating in 1979, she worked as a reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World, then moved to the Hays Daily News a year later.

In 1981, she accepted a reporting job at the Hutchinson News, and in 1982 joined the Harris Group’s management intern program. As an intern, she worked at Harris newspapers in Hutchinson, Olathe, Garden City and Hays.

She was named editor and publisher of the Hays Daily News in 1984, leading a talented staff eager to cover such tough issues as the farm crisis and the city’s water shortage.

In 1990, Doll was named publisher of the Camarillo Daily News, a Harris newspaper in Ventura County, California. When Harris sold its California properties in 1992, she moved back to Kansas to work at the Olathe Daily News as associate publisher.

She left the Harris group in 1994 to become assistant city editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal in Poughkeepsie, New York.

In 1994, she went to work at the Poughkeepsie Journal in New York and helped guide the newspaper’s coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. That day and the weeks and months that followed provided an array of lessons in the complex mix of good and evil that comprises humanity. Acts of heroism, threats against local Muslim families, truckloads of donations, vows of revenge, promises to rebuild, grief, kindness, anger, fear … the stories were too many to be told.

The same assessment could be made – on a larger, less intense scale – of the careers of most newspaper journalists.

In 2002, Doll became managing editor of the Lafayette, Indiana, Journal & Courier, which, like Poughkeepsie, was a Gannett property. In 2004, she was named executive editor in Lafayette.

In 2006, after two years of planning, focus groups, redesigns, technology upgrades, training, and a new press, the Journal & Courier introduced the Berliner-sized newspaper in the United States. The smaller format and full color newspaper were popular with readers.

In 2010, disheartened by the direction of the newspaper’s owner, Doll resigned. She went to work as a copy editor at the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette. In 2012, she was appointed business editor of the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle. She left that job and newspapers in 2015.

While in newsroom leadership positions in Indiana and Kansas, Doll was active in the states’ press associations and APME, serving as president of the Indiana APME and on the board of the Kansas Press Association.

She moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, a decision that, each year, seems wiser in January than in June.