Meyer, Eric

“Retiring” in 2021 after 26 years as a tenured journalism professor at the University of Illinois, Eric Meyer became full-time editor and publisher of the Marion County Record. He and his parents, Bill and Joan Meyer, had gone together 23 years earlier to purchase and preserve local ownership of the weekly, where his parents had worked for nearly five decades and he had worked part-time starting in fifth grade.

Before joining the Illinois faculty in 1996, Meyer taught part-time at Marquette University while working for 18 years as news photo and graphics editor, assistant news editor, systems editor, and copy desk chief at the Milwaukee Journal. He previously worked for two years as Sunday editor of the Daily Pantagraph in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. While teaching, he also created NewsLink, a prominent online resource; was online publisher of American Journalism Review magazine, and was a consultant about strategic planning for online publishing to more than 350 news organizations worldwide.

A Pulitzer Prize nominee for his coverage of computer hackers while at the Journal, he directed student projects at Illinois that won a national Mark of Excellence award from the Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the Web and Professor Publishing Awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. While at Illinois, he also served as an associate dean, as chair of the University Senate Committee on Educational Policy, and as a visiting professor of social media at the Dallas Morning News. He is author of two books, “Designing Infographics” and “Tomorrow’s News Today,”

After a now-disavowed police raid in 2023 of the Record’s newsroom and the home he shared with his 98-year-old mother, who died the next day, he and the newspaper were honored with numerous awards. Among them were the Don Bolles Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors; a Citation of Courage from the Radio, Television, Digital News Association; the William Allen White National Citation from the University of Kansas; the Maria Resa Prize for Courage in Local or Independent Journalism from the University of Maryland ;the Victor Murdock Award from the Kansas Press Association; and the Tom and Pat Gish Award from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky.

He has degrees from KU, where he was editor-in-chief of the University Daily Kansan, and Marquette.