Carol Horner, Longtime Journalist, Dies at 63

By: Carol Horner, director of a Maryland journalism institute and a former longtime Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, has died. She was 63.

Horner was found dead Friday in her Washington home. An official cause of death has not yet been determined, said her sister, Vivian "Vee" J. Davis.

Horner had been battling debilitating migraines in recent weeks, but that didn't stop the sisters from taking a vacation to South Carolina's Fritt Island earlier this month, Davis said Sunday.

Horner was a reporter and editorial writer at the Inquirer for 15 years and later worked as a features editor at The Wall Street Journal. She also was an editorial writer at The Bulletin in Philadelphia and a reporter and editorial writer for The Record in Hackensack, N.J.

Her father, longtime Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist Overton Jones, said that for a time, he and his daughter wrote editorials that effectively canceled each other out - he wrote conservative pieces for the Times-Dispatch and she wrote liberal ones for the Inquirer and other papers.

Since 2000, Horner had been director of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

A funeral will be held Tuesday at Trinity United Methodist Church in Richmond, Va.