It took a little scheming to get Max D. Lederer Jr. to a luncheon at America’s Newspapers’ Senior Leadership Conference in late September. But with the help of Lederer’s colleagues, Rufus Friday and Valerie Sherman — who devised a plan to get him to the ballroom — E&P’s Publisher Mike Blinder surprised Lederer with Editor & Publisher’s 2026 News Executive of the Year award.
“Everyone in this room understands the demands of leading a news organization,” Blinder said to the audience of news executives. “You have to meet payroll. Find revenue. Develop talent. Keep up with technology. Make difficult decisions, often with incomplete information. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you have to remember why your organization exists. Who depends on you? Who needs you to ask the question? Who needs you to keep asking when the answer doesn’t come? Our honoree has spent more than three decades serving a community whose members understand something about difficult assignments themselves.
“His readers move frequently. Their families start over in unfamiliar places. They endure long separations. They sometimes face extraordinary danger. They need reliable information to make decisions about their lives. They also need what every community represented in this room needs: a news organization that knows them, listens to them, and takes their concerns seriously. For those readers, a newspaper can be a connection to home — and a way to make sure someone back home hears them. This year’s honoree understood that responsibility long before this year’s headlines.”
You’re in the Army now
Though service to others has been a throughline in Lederer’s life — both professionally and personally — he didn’t initially join the military with that high calling in mind. Instead, his goal at that young age was pragmatic: he needed a way to pay for college. His father, who’d served during the Korean War, suggested a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship.
“In the ROTC program, I became really impressed — and also influenced — by the leadership aspects of the military, as well as the service aspect. … It began a period of my deep belief in service,” Lederer told E&P.
He described his younger self as “an overachiever.” His parents were both educators, so he excelled in school and played sports in both high school and college. When he enlisted in the Army that “gung-ho” spirit carried on. He enrolled in the U.S. Army’s Airborne School and became a parachutist. And when he completed his J.D., he became a combat-qualified judge advocate.
Most of Lederer’s service in the U.S. Army was spent overseas. He served in Korea, Germany and in the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. He said that was intentional. “I wanted to serve at ‘the tip of the spear,’ at the point where we are directly impacting the world,” he said.
For his heroic service overseas, Lederer was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
His travels through Asia, Europe and the Middle East also exposed him to other cultures.
“I realized in that process that we’re not isolated as a country and we need to understand how other people live and act and their challenges if we are going to help them — and if we’re going to ask them to help keep our and other countries safe,” he said. “That cultural interaction that you learn is extremely important. It’s not just interesting because you see interesting things. It’s essential to who we are.”
“As members of the military, it’s very important that we demonstrate the good parts of our culture,” he added. “That’s very important in obtaining allies and also educating potential enemies about the determination and the will of our country.”
During his time in the Army, Lederer’s leadership style began to take shape.
“In the service, one of the things that I came to understand is the value of leadership — how important it is to help people move forward, to lift morale and to be as good as they can be. But I also learned how damaging bad leadership can be,” Lederer reflected.
“I have spent my life trying to emulate good leadership traits. That’s always been a driving force for me. I think that has helped me very much in my professional career, because you can’t know every job that everybody does for an organization, but you have to know enough to help them be as successful as possible,” he said.
The Stars and Stripes decades
Stars and Stripes was first published during the Civil War. A group of Union soldiers published the first edition in Bloomfield, Missouri, and circulated it among their fellow soldiers. Though not continuously published since the 1860s, the brand endured. Wartime — for example, during World War I and World War II — rekindled the newspaper. In its current iteration, Stars and Stripes has been published since the 1940s.
“And the government, for a long, long time — from our recent history, since 1942 to the present — has realized how important it is to have this free press tell the service-member story, the military community’s story,” said Lederer.
He called Stars and Stripes a “strange animal” — an independent news organization within a government department. Part of the organization’s funding comes from the Department of Defense budget, but they have other revenue streams, as well: subscriptions, advertising and printing services.
As Stars and Stripes’ publisher, Lederer was keenly focused on the organization’s operational and fiscal health, but he didn’t lose sight of why the journalism mattered. He pointed to several recent impact examples. When the Pentagon evacuated U.S. service members and their families from Bahrain, out of safety concerns, Stars and Stripes reported on what those families needed as they faced uncertainty about their futures. And the military community rallied to come to their aid.
The newsroom also reported this year on the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been on an extended deployment because of war with Iran. Those are just two recent examples. Of course, impact has been part of the mission all along.
impacting the world,” he said.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes reported on the soft-skin supply and combat vehicles that left soldiers vulnerable. That reporting was based on more than 2,000 personal accounts of active-duty personnel and ultimately led the Pentagon to provide troops with better body and vehicle armor.
“It takes leaders who are enlightened, and it takes people paying attention to what’s going on and demanding change,” Lederer said.
One of the greatest logistical challenges he faced throughout his more than 30 years at Stars and Stripes was getting print editions to service members all across the globe — a mission mandated by Congress. That often requires printing in a remote location and distributing them by car, truck, train, bus or airplane.
“At one time, Stripes had a print site in Germany. It had a print site in Japan. During Desert Storm they printed in Germany and flew and trucked all the papers to the service members, as many as 250,000 copies a day to Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, all these locations,” said Lederer.
Rufus Friday, a former publisher, now executive director at the Center For Integrity In News Reporting, has come to know Lederer well and the challenges he’s faced as publisher. Friday chairs the Stars and Stripes Publisher Advisory Board. “I was a publisher myself, but some of the challenges I dealt with pale in comparison. I used to complain about not getting newspapers delivered a couple counties over. Here’s a guy who had to worry about making sure a print product was delivered all over the world,” Friday marveled.
Lederer was featured in and served as an executive producer for the documentary, “The World’s Most Dangerous Paper Route,” narrated by Steve Kroft. The film chronicles the journalists who reported for Stars and Stripes and the military personnel who risked their lives delivering the newspaper to troops in Afghanistan.
Friday described his friend and colleague as “a leader with a steady hand and cool composure.”
“He doesn’t walk into a place and expect a red carpet to be rolled out. He rolls up his sleeves and just gets right in there with service members,” he said.
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for Max, who has been in that chair for a long time, trying to make sure they’re providing a great news product for service members, their families and veterans. He’s done a phenomenal job, and despite all his accomplishments, he has not expected any kind of recognition whatsoever,” Friday added.
Lederer held several titles at Stars and Stripes, starting in 1992. He was general counsel, general manager, chief operating officer, acting publisher and then publisher.
As Lederer assumed the acting publisher role, a new digital dilemma presented: What should the website be, if not a mere replica of the print edition? At Stars and Stripes, they had discussions about how to exploit the internet’s strengths and make their digital product distinctive. Then came the massive shift in advertising and debates about paywalls and the valuation of journalism. Despite the Department of Defense’s funding, Stars and Stripes — like any other news media publisher — had to find other sources of revenue to ensure sustainability.
There were mandates to cut costs along the way, but Lederer often shielded the staff and found alternative cost-saving measures, for he understood that laying off newsroom and sales staff had self-defeating effects — less journalism and less revenue.
That’s not to say that Lederer hasn’t risen to the challenge of cutting costs. Along the way, he made tough decisions about changes to frequency. When distribution footprints became too expensive to maintain, the team devised other methods of getting news to military families in those places.
“That’s using good business practices and understanding your audience to adjust,” Lederer said. “It’s not a knee-jerk reaction from people who are not inculcated in understanding the business operation of news.”
Chris Verigan’s tenure at Stars and Stripes began as a graphic designer. But in 2018, he was promoted to director of engagement and became a first-time manager. “I will be forever grateful for Max, who took a chance on me when he hired me for this role. It has changed my life significantly.”
Three words come to Verigan’s mind when discussing Lederer: integrity, honesty and protective.
“He was always doing what he thought was best not just for the organization but for the staff,” Verigan observed. “The part of the budget we get from the government wavered up and down over the years, and his main concern was protecting the staff. The last thing he ever would want was cutting costs by getting rid of people, because he knew the impact that it would have on our audience and on those employees’ lives. That was important to him. Seeing that leadership from the person at the top of the pyramid trickles down to everyone else. … When I started this role in 2018, it was my first time directly managing people. Watching what he had done for years completely shaped the way I conduct myself at work and the way I think about my staff. It comes directly from his leadership.”
Lederer said that true leadership isn’t a one-way relationship — and that it was important to the health of the organization that he sought to understand the team’s challenges and ideas. “All that communication is extremely important, but it has to be effective communication — transparent positively and negatively,” he said.
The decades Lederer served as publisher was an era of relentless innovation, constant change. Along the way, Stars and Stripes adapted and innovated, too.
“We reach over 1.4 million people on any given day, because we have many platforms of delivery,” Lederer said. “It started with just a newspaper, and today, there’s Stars and Stripes’ primary website plus five additional community websites. It has a newspaper that’s published five days a week and 300 other print products during the year that are niche in content or niche in geography.”
Lederer has been a staunch advocate for print, not for nostalgia but for practical reasons. He explained, “If you’re living in a place like Guam or Diego Garcia or Kuwait, you may not have robust internet opportunities available, and if you do, they can be really expensive — not affordable for a staff sergeant who’s away from his family, who’s trying to manage two households, one deployed and one back home.
“If you’re driving a convoy all day long, you’re not sitting in front of a computer, which may be at home where your spouse and kids are using it for school and work. So, you need print products. Additionally, we have learned again from the Iran War that they are using cellphone data to do targeting. They see clusters of cellphones at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and say, ‘Oh, that must be a U.S. military installation, and we will target there.’ There is a movement within the department, as they should, to limit those usages, to eliminate or mask them — hence, again, more reliance on print products. … Our service men and women who are sacrificing, risking their lives, they deserve to have as much as we can provide them — not just about what’s going on in the world, but things that make them smile.” Lederer said that the military community “deserves that release” derived from humor or human-interest stories that assure them their loved ones stateside or deployed overseas are safe.
Those smiles may have been diminished this year when the Pentagon, under Secretary Pete Hegseth’s direction, mandated that Stars and Stripes no longer publish comics. Nor could the newsroom publish wire service content, nor editorials.
It is not the first time Stars and Stripes faced a Pentagon overreach. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the newsroom faced attempts to censor its reporting before Congress intervened and mandated that Stars and Stripes have a civilian editor and a civilian publisher, as well as an ombudsman.
During the first Trump administration, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper proposed defunding the organization entirely.
“It was President Trump at that time who stood up and said, no, we’re not going to do that,” said Lederer.
But the second Trump term has been a different story. In April 2026, the Pentagon fired Stars and Stripes’ ombudsman Jacqueline Smith without explanation.
Secretary Hegseth’s legacy will also include evicting media outlets from their Pentagon offices; requiring the press corps to sign a document governing what they can and cannot report; and he welcomed in “new media,” biased in favor of the administration.
Next came the Pentagon’s directive to Lederer to fire Editor Erik Slavin and Lara Korte, a Stars and Stripes reporter who covered the Middle East, citing “insubordination.” The journalists had made rather uncontroversial comments during interviews with CBS News about the publication’s editorial independence.
Lederer pushed back.
“I asked questions and gave them a chance to explain their viewpoint to me — why they thought those actions were insubordinate, why they thought that termination was the right step for a 20-plus-year employee and a three-year reporter who had no negative disciplinary actions, who’d been strong in her reporting. I did not get answers to those questions. All I got was a one-sentence response, ‘Do as you’re told.’”
Instead, Lederer announced his retirement. Just a few days later, Lederer, Slavin and Korte were all terminated. They subsequently filed a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Erik Slavin spoke with E&P about his long career at Stars and Stripes, which began in 2005, and about his observations of Lederer as a leader. He was one of the many people who nominated Lederer for this award.
“I got to know him better when I first became the bureau chief for Europe and the Middle East in 2017. Among other things, I had about two months to prepare a very large budget, covering everything from England to Afghanistan, and I learned how meticulous Max can be. … But if you knew your stuff, he would trust you, and he would grow to respect you,” Slavin said.
The former editor-in-chief described Lederer as a calm and measured problem-solver.
“He does set the cultural tone … that there’s something bigger to what we do here [at Stars and Stripes], and that there’s really no room for a big ego in that. It’s about getting the job done, and I think that permeated throughout the organization,” Slavin said.
He also remarked on how Lederer handled the past year in the Pentagon hot seat.
“I know it had to have been a tremendous load to bear. It was difficult on my end of things, and he had so much more because he was in the direct line of fire, so to speak. He would have to go over to the Pentagon and go into a room full of people who were not sympathetic to our mission,” Slavin said. “He carried a tremendous load, always with class and professionalism.”
On Oct. 13, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, appointed Christian Devine — who previously served as an executive director and principal adviser in the Pentagon’s public affairs office — as acting publisher of Stars and Stripes.
Labors of love
Lederer has been married to Sabine for 35 years. They met in Germany during his stint as a judge advocate there and while Sabine was serving as a German translator for the JAG department. The couple raised two sons, and two years ago, they became first-time grandparents.
For the past 13 years, the Lederers have run a nonprofit dog-rescue service. He estimates they’ve found homes for more than 4,000 dogs. “It’s a labor of love,” he said.
Valerie Sherman is an executive assistant and trademark specialist at Stars and Stripes. She worked alongside Lederer for the past four years.
“I can speak to his character,” Sherman told E&P. “He’s one of those rare people who picks up litter around him even when no one is looking. … Max is an incredible leader, mentor and just a genuinely good human being.”
In her nomination, Sherman wrote, “What distinguishes Max’s leadership is his ability to simultaneously protect what makes Stars and Stripes special while pushing the organization toward its future. He understands that the publication’s extraordinary history is an asset — but that history alone cannot sustain a modern news organization. … He also demonstrated resilience during periods when the easier choice would have been simply to manage the status quo. Instead, he continues to push the organization forward despite obstacles that are often complicated, bureaucratic and outside the traditional control of a news executive. He has had to make difficult decisions, balance competing demands and operate in an environment where the stakes are considerably higher than ordinary business performance.”
In retirement, Lederer has no plans to settle into an easy chair, though he hopes to spend more quality time with his family and friends. He’s considering his next move, which he hopes will blend education and service.
“Right now, people are listening to my voice, so I’m going to continue to use that voice,” he said.
As he reflected on his Stars and Stripes legacy, Lederer naturally steered the conversation back to the staff there: “At all levels of the organization … we are integrated into the communities we serve. We live within those communities We work within those communities. Our staff go to the same stores on base. They go to the same childcare centers. They go to the same finance offices, the same banks, the same vehicle registration office. So, they’re experiencing all the same kinds of stressors and successes that everybody else has.”
That familiarity fosters trust. Lederer said they often hear from readers who don’t hesitate to tell them when they feel they’ve gotten the story wrong or when they’re not covering something of importance. They also receive messages of gratitude.
“The military community believes they own the paper,” he said. “It’s their paper.”
Please join Editor & Publisher in congratulating — and thanking — Max Lederer Jr., the 2026 E&P News Executive of the Year.
Gretchen A. Peck is Editor & Publisher’s editor-in-chief. She has reported for E&P since 2010. She welcomes emails at editor@editorandpublisher.com.
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