Kansas Reflector senior reporter named to Kansas Press Association hall of fame
Tim Carpenter at Aug. 7, 2023, town hall at Theatre Salina. (Jessica Tufts for Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Longtime Kansas journalist and Kansas Reflector senior reporter Tim Carpenter has been selected for a statewide hall of fame honoring journalists. Reflector opinion columnist, nonprofit executive and author Mark McCormick was also named to the hall.
The Kansas Press Association announced the inductees Friday. Carpenter and McCormick were two of seven additions this year to its Newspaper Hall of Fame, in addition to four inductees for the Kansas Photojournalism Hall of Fame.
Carpenter, 64, has been the senior reporter for Kansas Reflector since its inception in 2020. Previously, he spent 15 years each at the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Lawrence Journal-World. He began his roughly 40-year career with United Press International in Topeka. He earned an agricultural journalism degree from Kansas State University.
“I’m excited to join a compelling group of hall of famers,” Carpenter said. “I’ve looked up to many of them during nearly 40 years of Kansas journalism that felt equal parts grinding work and delightful continuing education for my mind.”
Kansas Reflector editor Sherman Smith called Carpenter a “generational icon” who has been “revered and feared as an investigative and political reporter.”
The two have worked together for more than 20 years, beginning in the Topeka Capital-Journal newsroom. Smith said he looked to Carpenter for mentorship.
Reporter Tim Carpenter takes notes while speaking with Kansas Reflector readers on June 29, 2024, at Saint Andrew Christian Church in Olathe. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)
“There was no story too big — an attorney general’s sex scandal, a governor’s ‘prairie hellion’ of a brother — or beneath him,” Smith said. “College professors showed their students the video of Tim’s shakedown of a political candidate who had mocked patients’ X-rays. Some of the state’s most powerful people wouldn’t speak to the editorial board without knowing whether Tim would be there.”
Carpenter has won the Kansas Press Association’s Victor Murdock Award six times. The William Allen White Foundation honored him four times with its Burton Marvin News Enterprise Award. The Kansas City Press Club has twice presented him with its Journalist of the Year Award and, more recently, with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Tim worked selflessly to advance the skills and careers of numerous reporters. I abandoned my editing post at the newspaper for the opportunity to report alongside Tim from the Statehouse, where he taught me political reporting and helped me understand the bewildering legislative process,” Smith said.
Smith said upon launching Kansas Reflector five years ago, Carpenter was the first person he called to join the team.
“He agreed while other veteran journalists thought it was a crazy idea,” Smith said. “Here, he has continued to write compelling news stories of public interest — a university president’s academic integrity, the police raid on a small-town newspaper — and helped build Kansas Reflector into a model for a new generation of journalists to do the same.”
Pride and sheepishness
McCormick, formerly of the Wichita Eagle, is the second Black man to be inducted into the KPA’s hall of fame.
“The nomination itself feels like an award,” he said, “and winning it is something next level.”
McCormick has spent more than two decades in journalism. He has been a contributing columnist to Kansas Reflector since 2021, writing about humanity, race and politics.
“I am a person who finds it difficult to see other people suffering,” he said. I am most proud of those moments when someone was voiceless and had no hope, and I was able to help them.”
Mark McCormick, a Kansas Reflector contributor and longtime journalist, credited his family and mentor in his reaction to being installed in the Kansas Press Association’s Newspaper Hall of Fame (Submitted)
McCormick, 57, said he accepts the honor with “a great deal of pride,” but also “a little bit of sheepishness.” He can’t help but recall those who came before him — his mother, his father, his sister, who is the reason he pursued and graduated with a degree in journalism at the University of Kansas.
“My beloved journalism professor doesn’t have this,” he said.
“One of the most consequential people in my life, Samuel Adams, was a Black man who was teaching journalism at the University of Kansas at a time when I don’t think any other Black men were teaching journalism anywhere at a PWI — a predominantly white institution,” McCormick said.
Adams, who died in 2019, was a professor at the university from 1973 to 1999. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. McCormick characterized him as more like a father than a professor. He called him “Daddy Sam.”
Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone praised McCormick’s penetrating perspective.
“Mark’s deep insight, experience and care for his fellow Kansans shines through every column,” he said. “I’m honored to have him as a contributor to the Reflector’s opinion section.”
McCormick has won more than 20 awards, including five Gold Awards from the Kansas City Press Club. He is the co-author of a book detailing the origins and evolutions of Wichita’s African American community, and he has published a collection of his columns that has been used as required reading at Wichita State University. He was formerly the executive director of the Kansas Black Leadership Council, former chairman of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum.
He highlighted two stories as hallmarks of his career. One covered the life and death of a man who lived in a halfway house, who died because of delayed medical care. Another revealed poor driving records of public school bus drivers after months of evasion from the private bus company.
McCormick often refers to himself as a “recovering journalist.”
“I’ve always meant that I’m an addict for journalism, and you never get that out of your system,” he said. “You’re always in recovery.”
Carpenter and McCormick will be inducted to the KPA’s hall of fame on Nov. 13, at a luncheon held at the Sunflower Nonprofit Center in Topeka.