Newspaper editors inducted into hall of fame
Longtime Marion County Record columnist and co-owner Joan Meyer and Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer were inducted Friday into the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame.
Joan Meyer, 98, died Aug. 12, 2023, of sudden cardiac arrest attributed to stress of having seven police officers and sheriff’s deputies invade her home for more than 2½ hours to execute a search warrant that later was ruled legally insufficient.
She had worked for the Record for more than 60 years and continued to produce its popular Memories column each week up until her death.
“Not many people have microfilm viewers in their living rooms,” Eric Meyer said in accepting the award for her. “But she did.”
Joan Meyer’s death intensified national interest in a story about abuse of power in trying to silence a free press.
“Although I’m sure she didn’t want to go out the way she did, worrying about the Hitler tactics and so on,” Eric Meyer said, “it is kind of rare, at age 98, that your death means something to someone, that you go out and you’re sort of a martyr to your cause.”
Joan Meyer was the only one of seven inductees Friday to be honored posthumously. Oddly, her husband, Bill, was the first living editor inducted in 2003.
Others inducted were Ann Brill, dean of the University of Kansas journalism school; Sally Buzbee, a former executive editor of the Washington Post and Associated Press; small-town publishers Cynthia Haynes and Ben Marshall; and retired Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star reporter Roy Wenzl.
In an acceptance speech after his own induction, Eric Meyer had a message for journalists struggling with their sense of purpose: Go on the offensive.
“I think this is a time when we have to establish for the people of this country the fact that we are important, that we have things that we can tell them that they will want to know, that they will want to change their positions about,” Meyer was quoted as saying in a Kansas Reflector article published Monday.
In a nod to results of the presidential election, he added: “Let’s not make America great again. Let’s make democracy great again.”
Meyer said he was “an odd duck” because he had retired to run a newspaper, rather than retire from it.
As reported in a story by the Reflector on Monday, he returned to Kansas during the COVID-19 pandemic to take over the publication, which his parents had operated for decades and he had joined them in purchasing in 1998.
After teaching journalism for 26 years at University of Illinois, Meyer wanted to practice what he had been preaching — that journalism is still vital.
“We’re not talking about the future of journalists,” Meyer was quoted as saying in a Reflector article. “We’re talking about the future of democracy.
“Without journalism, there is no democracy. We can’t have an informed public making informed decisions that will lead our country if they don’t have information, solid information that’s reliable. Getting their attention, though, is a very serious problem.”
Before the 2023 raid on his newspaper, Meyer said, circulation and ad revenue already were up, “because we were trying to do the best news stories we could.”
After the raid, thousands of people from across the country purchased subscriptions in a show of support. Many of them, he said, are actually reading the paper. Some have become so invested in news out of Marion County that they are even writing letters to the editor.
His advice to other journalists: “Forget all the gimmicks. Don’t worry about what you put on social media. Don’t worry about the video you’re shooting. Don’t worry about the blogs you’re writing. Don’t worry about the marketing techniques. Do good journalism, period. Good journalism. That means finding stories that affect people and giving them an opportunity to do something about it.”