'E&P' Names Edward M. Sears Editor of Year

By: E&P Staff By combining aggressive newsroom recruiting with an insistence on old-fashioned newspaper values, Edward M. Sears has transformed The Palm Beach Post of West Palm Beach, Fla., into a journalistic powerhouse with a reporting impact far greater than its modest circulation might suggest -- earning him the distinction of being E&P's Editor of the Year.

Over the course of two decades at the Post, Eddie Sears has assembled a newsroom that has become a destination for talented journalists from much bigger papers such as The Miami Herald and The Denver Post. In recent years, the 154,000-circulation Cox Newspapers Inc. daily has reaped the payoff of that investment with national recognition for its coverage of such highly charged stories as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the 2000 presidential election recount, the post-9/11 anthrax poisoning at the offices of the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, and local Catholic church leaders stepping down in a sex abuse scandal.

In 2003, the Post's enterprise reporting rocked highly competitive south Florida -- and rattled the state's powers-that-be. A series on the modern day slavery of migrant workers forced Florida to reexamine the working conditions of its agricultural laborers. The Post prompted a state criminal investigation of the school voucher program by revealing such abuses as shelling out taxpayer money to an Islamist school with alleged terrorist ties. The newspaper jousted with Gov. Jeb Bush so often in 2003 that he barred the paper's capital reporters from his traditional year-end interviews.

Sears leads the newsroom with a philosophy that eschews the many fads of the newspaper industry -- from civic journalism to theme beats -- in favor of emphasizing old-fashioned shoe leather reporting and permitting the kind of quirky individual writing and story packaging that many editors long ago bled out of their papers.

"Eddie values people with personality," says Associate Editor Jan Tuckwood. "And he lets us use our personality. So we do more laugh-out-loud things, and serious journalism, in this paper than any place I know."

Last year's Editor of the Year was Douglas C. Clifton of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

E&P subscribers may read the full profile of Sears from the February issue of E&P.