Celebrity Deathwatch: Katherine Fanning, Journalist, 73

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/10/21/obit.fanning.ap/index.html

Journalist Katherine Fanning dies at 73
October 21, 2000
Web posted at: 12:10 PM EDT (1610 GMT)


BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Katherine W. Fanning, the former editor of the
Christian Science Monitor and the Anchorage Daily News, has died. She was
73.

Her husband, Amos Mathews, said she died Thursday after a long struggle with
colon cancer.

Fanning got her start in journalism when she married the former editor and
publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1950. She delved into the business in
earnest when she bought the Anchorage Daily News in 1967 with her second
husband, Larry Fanning, who died in 1971.

Under her stewardship, the Anchorage paper won the Pulitzer for public
service in 1976 for a 15-part series on Alaska's powerful Teamsters Union,
and its circulation rose from 12,000 to 50,000, becoming the state's largest
newspaper.

Fanning served as the paper's editor and publisher from 1971 to 1983, when
she left to become editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

"All of us at the Monitor loved Kay," Monitor Editor David Cook said in a
statement Friday. "She was a pioneering force in American journalism -- the
first woman to run a national paper and the first woman president of the
American Society of Newspaper Editors.

"She was passionate about the news and passionate in her love for the
Monitor," Cook said.

Her first marriage, to Chicago Sun-Times editor and publisher Marshall Field
IV, also the heir to the department store fortune, ended in divorce in 1963.
But Fanning said the marriage was an important introduction to journalism.

"I was closely associated with the effort behind the scenes, a once-removed
education in all aspects of a metropolitan newspaper," she once said.
"Marshall brought home his journalist associates, and also his problems,
which we would work on together."

She was editor of the Christian Science Monitor from 1983 to 1988, when she
and two top editors resigned in protest when the church imposed budget cuts.

Born in Joliet, Illinois, Fanning graduated from Smith College in
Northampton in 1949. She was a member of the board of directors at The
Boston Globe Newspaper Co. since 1992, and served from 1988 to 1989 on The
Associated Press board of directors. She served on the boards of several
foundations and taught ethics at Boston University for two years.

Besides her husband of 17 years, she is survived by three children and eight
grandchildren.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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