34 named to Newspaper Hall of Fame
This year, 34 new members will be inducted into the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame, the largest group ever in a single year.
Download this month's Publisher here to see the stories and photos of the inductees.
An explanation of the process that led to this year’s decisions can be found below. Mostly, it’s catching up on a number of people who were overlooked in the past because of rather tight restrictions in the guidelines previously used for consideration that favored newspaper executives.
The following are capsule looks at this year’s inductees. More detailed biographies will be published this fall on the Kansas Press Association website and then available through the digital Kansas Media Hall of Fame newly opened at Stauffer/Flint Hall at the University of Kansas.
Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas
Award-winning investigative reporters for the Kansas City Star, Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas have specialized in long term projects that hold government and others in power accountable.
Thomas came to the Star in 1995 after seven years at the Wichita Eagle.
Bauer, who graduated from Missouri State University in 1998, worked at the Courier-Journal in Louisville before joining the Star in 2005.
She teamed with Thomas, a Kansas State University graduate, on several award-winning reports, including “Why so secret Kansas?” – which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the public service category.
The series led to new initiatives in Kansas state government.
They also collaborated on a series about Missouri’s child welfare system and in 2019 did a six-part series titled “Throwaway Kids” and another series that uncovered serious deficiencies that allowed private residential schools to operate unchecked.
In 2012, Thomas received a Society for Features Journalism award for “The Altar Boys’ Secret,” a series about a 30-year mystery of priest sexual abuse and suicide
Paul Branson Sr.
There may not be too many newspaper industry veterans who can compete with the longevity of Paul Branson Sr. He’s been selling ads and mentoring salespeople for the past 61 years, all of it in Miami County.
He attended the University of Missouri, where he learned to operate a Linotype.
He worked for fellow Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame member Web Hawkins first at the Osawatomie Graphic, then when it sold to Phil and Sara McLaughlin, the Graphic joined the Miami County Republic and the Louisburg Herald.
The three newspapers were combined into one edition in 2016.
Branson was named the Gaston Outstanding Mentor in 2012.
Christine and Tom Buchanan
The Buchanans worked side-by-side after buying the Bucklin Banner in 1956. In 1959, they bought the Washington County News and operated it until 1981.
Tom, who was known as “Buckshot,” was a prolific editorial and column writer and in 1966 won first place in editorial writing from the National Newspaper Association for an editorial titled “The American Dream.”
Christine reported news and wrote a popular weekly column for the News.
In 1974, they won the Victor Murdock Award for their coverage of the town of Greenleaf following a devastating tornado the previous year.
He served as president of Kansas Press Association in 1981-82.
Tom earned his bachelor’s degree from Sterling College in 1950 and worked at the Sterling Bulletin.
After marrying Christine, he went to work for at the Phillips County Review.
Two of their five children, Bruce and Jean, followed them in the newspaper business.
Jean Buchanan
Jean Buchanan, who enters the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame at the same time as her parents, Tom and Christine Buchanan, got her start in journalism working at their weekly newspaper, The Washington County News, in north-central Kansas.
From 1982 to 1990 she worked as a reporter and managing editor of the Atchison Daily Globe in Atchison, Kan., where a Kansas City Star Magazine story about the murder of her boss eventually led her to The Star. She spent nine years there and coached investigative projects and reported and wrote a series that focused on women who graduated from Kansas City area high schools in 1972 to show how women’s lives were changing. The series won a national award.
From 1999 to 2004 she worked at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and then moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where as an assistant managing editor she supervised investigative projects.
She was the editor of a narrative and multimedia project, Reporting for Duty, that won an Emmy and a national award from the Online News Association. She was part of the newsroom team that won the national Scripps-Howard Award for breaking news for coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the protests that followed.
Jean was married to Dan Wiggs, a highly regarded copy desk chief at The Kansas City Star and the Philadelphia Daily News. After he suffered a severe stroke, she cared for him while working full time, until his death.
Julie Doll
Reporting and leadership roles dotted the career of 1979 Kansas State University graduate Julie Doll.
She worked as a reporter at the Lawrence Journal-World and the Hays Daily News and then moved to the Hutchinson News in 1981, but a year later she joined the Harris Enterprises management intern program.
She was named editor and publisher of the Hays Daily News in 1984, leading a talented staff covering tough issues like the farm crisis and the city’s water shortage.
In 1990, she took over as publisher of the Camarillo Daily News, a Harris property in California.
After those properties were sold in 1994, she went to work in newsroom management at the Poughkeepsie Journal in New York and guided the newspaper’s coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
From 2002 to 2010, she worked at the Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier. In 2012, she was named business editor of the Wichita Eagle before leaving the business in 2015.
Jeannie Kygar Eblen
Jeannie Kygar Eblen was known as a skilled writer and editor at area newspapers, a national magazine, the University of Kansas and several non-profit organizations.
Born in Chautauqua County in southeast Kansas, Eblen graduated in 1966 from Oklahoma State University and married Tom Eblen. Later, she worked as a reporter for 10 years at the Kansas City Star, then was field editor for Better Homes & Gardens magazine for four years.
When Tom was named general manager of the Fort Scott Tribune, she immersed herself in freelance writing and as public information officer for Fort Scott Community College.
When the Eblens moved to Lawrence so Tom could take over as general manager of the University Daily Kansan and as a news professor at the University of Kansas, Jeannie was known as the “newsroom mom.”
She also worked as a copy editor at the Star, the Lawrence Journal-World and the Miami County Republic.
Susan Edgerley
Susan Edgerley began a distinguished newspaper career at the Arkansas City Traveler after graduating from Kansas State University in 1976.
More than four decades later, the long-time New York Times editor returned to her alma mater to inspire and support future journalists as a Professor-in-Residence.
Edgerley was supervising 150 staffers as deputy metro editor at the Times when two planes hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The coverage lasted four years.
Her career led her to the Times after four years at the Philadelphia Daily News, six years as a reporter at the Wichita Eagle and three years at the newspaper in Arkansas City.
She retired from the Times in 2012 after 27 years serving as assistant managing editor and as dining editor.
Dan and Jan Epp
Dan Epp promised his wife Jan that their stay at the Greeley County Republican would last just five years. They had gone back home to help Dan’s father, Otto Epp, in Tribune.
Yet, 35 years later, they retired as co-editors of the newspaper having shared a community’s joys and triumphs, heartaches and loss through more than 1,800 weekly editions.
They encouraged citizens to be proud of their community. They also became key leaders, initiating a process in 2004 with Kansas Communities to rebuild the town square and its image. At the time, Dan said the community was one business closure and one more failed harvest away from saying “last one out turn out the lights.”
Their actions and the actions of others moving forward from the first community meeting of 166 concerned community members led to population growth, enrollment growth and a revitalization of the area.
Gloria Freeland
A professor for 37 years at the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University, Gloria Freeland became synonymous with community journalism.
She was associate director of Student Publications Inc. for 15 years and director of the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media for 22 years, retiring in 2020.
She organized the Collegian’s 1996 centennial celebration, the 2010 Miller School centennial gala and served on the planning committee for K-State’s sesquicentennial activities in 2013.
She also served for 15 years as the school’s internship coordinator.
She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s degree in business administration from K-State.
She and her husband, Art Vaughan, a former K-State professor, wrote a book, “An Opportunity to Be Better,” about the sister city relationship between Morganville, Kan. and Metz, France after World War II. It was published in English and later in French.
Patricia Weems Gaston
After a stellar career at the Washington Post, Patricia Weems Gaston joined the University of Kansas.
At the Post, she worked on several desks, including National, Foreign and Editorial. Prior to her work at the Post, she worked at the Dallas Morning News and was co-editor of the 1994 international reporting Pulitzer Prize-winning series on violence against women.
She graduated from the William Allen White School of Journalism at KU in 1981 and added a master’s degree in sports management from The George Washington University.
In 2013, she was a Leadership Institute Fellow with the Center for America Progress, a progressive public policy program. She served two terms as co-chair osf the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force of the American Association of University Women.
Gaston returned to Kansas as the Lacy C. Haynes Professor. While at KU, she has advised the staff of the University Daily Kansan, led the search for the Knight Chair in Audience and Community Engagement for News and served as a mentor in the Rising Scholars Program.
She is currently working with two KU colleagues on a series of webinars on disinformation and misinformation to address the ways in which systems perpetuate the spread of both.
Bonita Gooch
Bonita Gooch has been a positive force in Kansas journalism since she bought The Community Voice in Wichita in 1996. It was her father who encouraged her to use her journalism and public administration degrees in her hometown when Bill and Yvette McCray put the paper up for sale.
The newspaper, in its 28th year, is a trusted source of news and information for the African-American communities of Kansas and the Kansas City metro area. The free-circulation newspaper, printed every two weeks, is a multi-platform news source through an electronic edition, a state-of-the-art website, multiple newsletters, a YouTube channel and active social media streams.
Gooch has grown circulation in recent years despite the downturn in the industry.
In 2021, she hired a publisher, which allowed her to focus entirely on editorial content.
She is most proud of the Voice’s tradition of bringing attention to stories that otherwise would not come t light.
Gooch earned her B.A. in journalism at the University of Kansas and later a master’s degree in public administration.
Kathy Hageman
Kathy Hageman’s journalism career began unexpectedly some 38 years ago. If anything, she was reluctantly forced into it.
“I had been a high school teacher and that was an abject failure,” she said.
After realizing that teaching was not her cup of tea, Hageman returned home to Abilene, was living with her parents and found a job on the night shift at a convenience store — a job that she was content with.
“My parents and my brother Dale thought I was wasting a good education so they forced me to take a job at the Larned Tiller and Toiler as proofreader,” she said.
The owner, Chuck Walton, had previously worked at the Abilene Reflector-Chronicle.
“I went down there as a typesetter and proofreader and Dale was the production manager,” she said. “I learned to typeset on a bell typesetter machine. About a year into it two reporters left and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look too hard.’ The owner said, ‘OK, if you think you can do it, go ahead.’ So, I did.”
Although journalism had never been in her plans, once she started, she knew she had found the road she wanted to stay on. She said she believes her passion for history is behind her love of journalism.
“I think being able to record the history of a community, or a person or a government entity — what is happening that will someday become history, is what I find very interesting,” she said. “When it comes to interviewing people, I really like to talk to them and tell their stories. I live vicariously through people – I don’t consider myself that interesting, I’m more of an observer.”
Steve Haynes
The newspaper career of Steve Haynes spans more than five decades, the majority of it in Kansas.
A graduate of the University of Kansas, he began his professional newspaper career at the Kansas City Star and Times.
He moved to Colorado, led where he the Mineral County Miner and the South Ford Times in Creede, Colo. from 1980 to 1986. He was co-owner and co-publisher of SLV Publishing in Monte Vista, Colo. from 1986 to 1993.
He and Cynthia moved to northwest Kansas and he was the co-owner, publisher and editor of Haynes Publishing Co. and Nor’West Newspapers for nearly 30 years until his retirement. Those newspapers included the Colby Free Press, Goodland Star-News, St. Francis Herald and Bird City Times, and later the Rawlins County Square Deal and a shopper, the Country Advocate.
While Steve Haynes has been in the newspaper business for more than five decades, the majority of it in Kansas, his accomplishments in the industry are outstanding as well.
He was president of the Colorado Press Association in1988, where he headed successful campaign for the state Sunshine Law and president of the Kansas Press Association in 1998-99.
In 2008, he was elected president of the National Newspaper Association after serving in a number of capacities on the board. He still serves on the NNA Foundation board.
Melinda Henneberger
Melinda Henneberger was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2022. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2021 for commentary, for editorial writing in 2020 and for commentary in 2019.
Melinda Henneberger’s career as a Metro columnist at the Kansas City Star has included persuasive columns demanding justice for alleged victims of a retired Kansas City, Kan. police detective accused of being a sexual predator, which led to the Pulitzer Prize last year.
At the Star, Henneberger became a clarion voice in the community, delivering deeply reported columns that broke news, revealed injustices and held elected officials to account.
After a one-year trek to the Sacramento Bee, she is back at the Star.
Before joining the Star in 2017, her journalism career took her from Dallas to New York City to Washington, D.C. with a stint in Italy along the way.
At the Washington Post, she launched, managed and edited the paper’s opinion blog of women writers, She the People, and wrote a column.
Nancy Horst and Roberta Birk Mlynar
Nancy Horst’s first job after graduating from Kansas State University in 1978 allowed her to work in multiple roles for three years at the McPherson Sentinel.
Following a short stint in the Emporia Gazette’s production department, she joined the reporting staff. She met up with Roberta Birk, now writing as Bobbi Mlynar, who had begun as a keypunch operator at the Gazette in the 1960s but later became a reporter.
They worked together to cover a national story in the 1980s after the 1983 double murders and an alleged tryst between murder suspects: an Emporia pastor and his church secretary.
Then-Emporia Gazette managing editor Ray Call credited the two reporters with having significant roles in solving the murders. The Gazette nominated them for Pulitzer Prize.
The editor at the time, Kathrine Klinkenberg White, also named this year to the Hall of Fame, led the effort.
Birk Mlynar also was the Emporia area correspondent for the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Kansas City Star. She was named city editor and kept that position until she left journalism in 1994.
Horst also had multiple roles in the newsroom before she left the Gazette to become a communications director for the Emporia school system in 1992. She and Call published a history of the Emporia Chamber of Commerce in 1987.
Peggy Hull
During her 31-year career, Peggy Hull was the first woman war correspondent accredited by the United States government and the first woman to serve on four battlefronts.
She followed American soldiers around the world, and her articles were popular on the home front because she presented personal stories of the lives of soldiers.
Her story is well-documented by the Kansas State Historical Society and multiple writers, including a detailed account of her life by Pamela D. Toler in “The American Scholar.”
Born Henrietta Eleanor Goodnough, she later changed her name to Peggy Hull. She grew up in Marysville. In 1905, 16-year-old Henrietta applied for a reporting job at the Junction City Sentinel. She was offered a job setting type and took it. She received her first reporting assignment two weeks later when a fire broke out.
Between 1909 and 1916, she worked for newspapers in Colorado, California, Hawaii and Minnesota.
She later reported from the battlefront in World War I in France. In 1939, Hull became a founding member of the Overseas Press Club of America and covered World War II in the Pacific Theatre and was awarded a Navy commendation for her work.
Bob Johnson
Remarkably, 56 years of Bob Johnson’s 63-year newspaper career were spent at one newspaper, the Iola Register.
Described by his colleagues as a “journalistic workhorse,” Johnson has written “thousands and thousands” of news stories, features and columns for the Register. He retired in 2020.
Johnson served as sports editor, city editor and reporter, but writer best describes his career.
The figures tell part of his story:
• 5,000 – estimated number of city council, county commission, school board and other meetings he attended and wrote about.
• 2,500 – how many weeks his personal column ran.
• 100 – number of junior college, high school and junior high basketball games he covered during a season.
• 300 – estimated number of stories he wrote about agriculture.
• 400 to 500 – number of editorials he wrote, many while filling in for vacationing editors.
He was named the Gaston Outstanding Mentor in 2019.
Sarah Kessinger
In 2008, Sarah Kessinger came home and became the editor of her parents’ newspaper, the Marysville Advocate, which Howard and Sharon Kessinger had made into a scommunity treasure.
She admired what they did.
If you like your work like Sarah does, you make the days longer to make the reporting more thorough, the story budgets more varied, the writing clearer. If you love your community like she does, you serve as a community advocate, touting its picturesque old buildings, its restaurants and commercial district as much as you can.
Sarah’s parents bought the newspaper in 1975, when she was 10 years old.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Kansas State University in journalism and in Spanish.
She started her career at the Garden City Telegram, where her Spanish degree came in handy. She helped the newspaper start its bilingual weekly newspaper, La Semana.
After serving as deputy metro editor of The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, she moved to Topeka and did a 12-year stint covering the Kansas Legislature for the Harris News Service before moving to Marysville to join the Advocate staff.
Sharon Totten Kessinger
Sharon Kessinger and her Hall of Fame husband, Howard, bought the Oberlin Herald early in their careers. They sold it in 1975 and bought the Marysville Advocate.
She started her career in journalism at the Pryor Creek Daily Times in Oklahoma after she graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in journalism in 1959. She was co-editor of the student newspaper, The Collegian.
After two years in Oklahoma, she took over as news editor of the Abilene Reflector-Chronicle. In 1962, she married Howard and moved to Oberlin.
They served as co-publishers in Marysville for 35 years and played an influential role in the community, never hesitating to write hard news stories.
She and Howard produced an unusually lively, deeply reported and well-written newspaper.
Sharon wore many hats in the community, including maintaining the public gardens at Marysville’s Koester House Museum across the street and the town’s Water Tower Hill.
Susan Lynn
Susan Lynn has been the editor and publisher of the Iola Register since 2001, a year after joining her Hall of Fame father, Emerson Lynn, at the newspaper.
She is past president of the Kansas Press Association, a board trustee for the Kansas Newspaper Foundation and currently serves on the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct.
Under her leadership, the Register has won sweepstakes awards in both news and advertising three years running.
A graduate of Western Washington University, Lynn began her college career studying journalism at the University of Kansas, but her education in newspapers began much earlier, when she and her brothers helped assemble the Bowie News and subsequently at the Iola Register.
The Register has been Lynn’s endless passion and her greatest pride. She has guided the Register through arguably the most difficult and transformational period in its history.
Her focus on covering Iola’s residents, on telling their stories and documenting their lives, has allowed a strong sense of mission to embody its journalism.
Ruth Miller
Darrel and Ruth Miller bought the Downs News and Times in 1958, which led to purchases of The Lebanon Times, Cawker City Ledger and Smith County Pioneer.
She attended college briefly at Oklahoma State University and worked for 14 years with Darrel at the Downs newspaper. She became managing editor in 1972 of the Downs, Cawker City and Lebanon newspapers. She also operated flower shops in Downs and Osborne.
In 2003, Ruth received the Kansas Press Association’s Boyd Community Service Award.
Darrel and Ruth Miller for several decades proved to be community leaders in every sense of the term, and Downs, Smith Center and Osborne County prospered all the more for it.
She joins husband Darrel Miller in the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame.
Colleen McCain Nelson
A native of Salina, Colleen McCain Nelson graduated from the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas.
Months before her graduation, the legendary Tom Eblen made the following prediction: “That Salina kid is going to win the Pulitzer Prize, take over the Kansas City Star and end up telling all of us what to do in this God-forsaken racket.”
She did just that. She won a Pulitzer and helped supervise the Star for several years. She has served as executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and as the California regional editor for the McClatchy media company since 2021.
She leads McClatchy’s California newsrooms, navigating them to dig deeper into the digital age with all the modern challenges.
In 2016, she became vice president and editorial page editor of the Star. Before that, she was the White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, covering the Obama White House for four years.
She has been an editorial writer for The Dallas Morning News, where she won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. She also worked at The Star-Telegram in Fort Worth and The Wichita Eagle.
Marjorie McLaughlin
Marjorie McLaughlin was an integral part of the family that published newspapers in Paola for 84 years, including a stint as publisher in the 1980s.
She received a degree in English from the University of Kansas in 1938. She married Drew McLaughlin Jr. that year and moved to Paola where Drew worked with his parents and sister on The Miami Republican.
During her half century there, she served as periodic proofreader, copy editor, office manager and eventually as publisher following her husband’s death.
After retirement from the newspaper company in 1991, she moved to Overland Park and later to Lawrence.
McLaughlin was a voracious reader, a sometimes poet and an avid world traveler in her later years.
Clarina Nichols
Clarina I.H. Nichols was a journalist and newspaper editor in Kansas who used her skills during the major reform movements of the mid-19th century.
Nichols was a prolific journalist, a skillful storyteller, and an advocate for the causes of temperance, abolition and women’s rights, based on Diane Eickhoff’s biography, Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights (2006).
Nichols understood the power that stories about individual women’s struggles and sufferings had to inspire a greater understanding about the gender inequities of 19th Century American society.
Multiple accounts of Nichols’ influence during her years in Kansas are sprinkled through Kansas Historical Society archives.
She moved from Vermont to Kansas with her family in 1854. Records say that she had hoped the emerging state would offer an opportunity to create laws that benefited women.
Nichols was the only woman invited to the Wyandotte Convention in 1859, which resulted in the writing of the Kansas Constitution.
Clementine Paddleford
For more than three decades, Clementine Paddleford was known as “America’s No. 1 Food Editor.”
Paddleford grew up relishing home-cooked food. Millions of Americans treasured her recipes and feasted on her descriptions of food. Without her, Midwesterners might not have known there are options to eating mincemeat and pumpkin pies for holiday dessert. She introduced regional cooking to America.
A skilled pilot, she flew across the country to report stories.
Born on a farm in Riley County in 1898, she was a graduate of Kansas State Agricultural College.
Susanne Shaw
The daughter of a small-town Kansas newspaper man, Susanne Shaw for five decades dedicated her life to journalism education at the University of Kansas and throughout the world.
Shaw began as a high school journalism teacher in 1961 in Wichita and was unwavering in this guiding principle: students, “I love students,” she once said. “They bring me happiness that money can’t buy.”
She grew up in Wellington and worked summers at the Daily News, eventually doing every job at the newspaper.
After graduation from KU with a bachelor’s degree from the School of Education, she taught at Wichita South High School, returned to get her master’s degree in journalism, then returned to Wichita South to be publications adviser and journalism teacher.
She joined the KU journalism faculty in 1971. She left Kansas once briefly to work at the Tallahassee Democrat before entering a management training program. She left Lawrence again to become editor and publisher of the Coffeyville Journal, but returned to the KU faculty again in 1984, where she remained for the next 35 years.
Beccy Tanner
Few journalists have done as much to promote a love of Kansas as Beccy Tanner, who for decades covered history and rural Kansas for The Wichita Eagle.
She published two books about Kansas history. Her subjects range from the Adam’s Apple Festival in Lucas to how Nicodemus is using conversations about race and history to bring people together.
Her articles about the Smith County cabin where Brewster Higley wrote the poem that became the words to our state song, “Home on the Range,” prompted a successful state-wide fund-raising drive to preserve the cabin.
In 2011, The Kansas Sampler Foundation honored Tanner with its annual We Kan! Award, recognizing her “for lifting rural Kansas with her pen.”
After leaving The Eagle in 2018 during downsizing, she was named one of “Kansas Finest” by the Travel Industry Association of Kansas for her stories and promotion of Kansas people and places to see.
Kathy Taylor
Kathy Taylor was asked once to describe her world of community journalism viewed through the lens of 70-plus years as a fourth-generation journalist: “I only know three words: family, newspaper, business.”
She was born in Caney, where her parents H.K. “Skeet” and Ethel George, owned the local newspaper, the Caney Daily Chronicle, giving her a front-row seat to the world of community journalism.
She and husband Rudy bought the Chronicle in 1970 from Kathy’s parents, and Kathy has never left the street of her birth nor the newspaper of her upbringing.
Today, the Taylor Newspaper company includes three newspapers in southeast Kansas: the Montgomery County Chronicle, the Labette Avenue and the Prairie Star.
She writes a weekly column, “Life’s Little Lifesavers,” one of the most sought-after elements in the newspaper. They are brief phrases that reflect on the happier aspects of life.
It’s a joy to read a local newspaper, she says, just as it is in smelling the aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.
She joins husband Rudy Taylor and father H.K. “Skeet” George in the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame.
Vickie Walton-James
As managing editor/news for NPR, Vickie Walton-James has an impressive story.
Walton-James is responsible for the newsgathering efforts of all NPR desks, shows and platforms. She also has assumed day-to-day supervision of the National, Washington, Culture and Education desks.
Before the new role, she was chief national editor for NPR News for eight years, supervising a desk of 50 reporters, editors and producers in the nation’s capital. That followed a stint as NPR’s deputy national editor.
Walton-James is a native of Kansas City, Kan. and a graduate of the University of Kansas.
She started her career as a new clerk at the Kansas City Star but won quick promotions to reporter, editor and columnist. Her beats included courts, police, prisons, society services and residential real estate.
She joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune in 1989 and in 1995 was transferred to the Trib’s Washington bureau as deputy bureau chief.
In 2001, she was part of a team leading coverage of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. She was named Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief that same month.
Kathrine Klinkenberg White
The seeds of Kathrine Klinkenberg White’s journalism career were planted in Ottawa (Kan.) High School’s newspaper and yearbook.
She brought them into full bloom when she married into a small town, family-owned community newspaper with a nationally famous founder, William Allen White.
Kathrine had been hired as an office assistant by Time magazine soon after attending the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin.
While filling in as interim sports editor in Time’s editorial department, she seized on the opportunity to do a flyover of New York City with Amelia Earhart piloting the plane.
Kathrine later became assistant curator at the Library of Congress.
After marrying William Lindsay White in 1931, the couple initially divided their time between Emporia, which he represented as a state legislator, and the nation’s capital, where he wrote for the Washington Post.
She edited most of his first drafts and edited several books by her husband as well as William Allen White’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, which W.L. completed after his father died.
After her husband’s death from cancer in 1973, she took over as the Emporia Gazette’s editor.
A double murder led her to invite New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin to Emporia to write a long piece on the case.