The Journalists

Beyond Greene and Foellinger, the press record holds a line of editors and columnists whose work was the city's daily literature. Claude G. Bowers (1878–1958) edited the Journal Gazette from 1917 to 1923, arriving as secretary to U.S. Senator John Worth Kern — whose biography he published in 1918 — and writing the weekly column "Cabbages and Kings." Fort Wayne was his springboard: from its editorial chair he went to the New York World in 1923 and to national standing as a Democratic historian and speechwriter — Jefferson and Hamilton (1925), The Tragic Era (1929) — and then to twenty years as ambassador to Spain and Chile. His Fort Wayne years sit at the head of the Journal Gazette's tradition of editors with national ambitions. At the other end of the century, Craig Klugman edited the same paper for thirty-three years, from 1982 to his retirement in late 2015 — a tenure spanning the JOA's chain years and the internet's arrival — and in 1998 helped produce "The State of Secrecy," a seven-newspaper investigative series on abuses of Indiana's public access laws that ran simultaneously across the state and led to the creation of the Indiana Public Access Counselor's Office: Fort Wayne editing as state policy.

The News-Sentinel's bench was built in the Foellinger decades, when editor Ernest "Ernie" Williams ran a newsroom noted for sending reporters on to larger papers and broadcast careers. Its last defining voice was Kevin Leininger, the paper's city columnist, whose column carried the News-Sentinel's institutional memory — its history features remain a source throughout this work — into the paper's final years; when Fort Wayne Newspapers suspended the News-Sentinel in April 2020, Leininger was its last remaining staff member, furloughed as the paper went silent. The broadcast journalists — Hilliard Gates, Ann Colone, Bob Chase, Melissa Long, Heather Herron — are treated with their stations below and in the People record; the line between print and broadcast benches was always porous in Fort Wayne, and the same names recur on both sides of it.

Sources: Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, Claude G. Bowers biography (1966 inductee); Indiana University Archives, Bowers papers finding aid (Journal Gazette editorship 1917–1923; "Cabbages and Kings" per the Hall of Fame biography); Indiana University Media School, Distinguished Alumni profile of Craig Klugman (editor 1982–2015; "The State of Secrecy," 1998); America's Newspapers (May 2020) and News-Sentinel reference history (Leininger as final staff member); Alchetron/News-Sentinel history (Ernie Williams's editorship).