John K. Baker, who managed five US newspapers during his career, has died at age 90

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John K. Baker, who died in late December at  his home in Decize, France, was a master mentor to many reporters he hired and inspired during his management of five U.S. newspapers.

“Not only an old-school, solid newsman and editor, but also a man of principle and integrity,” wrote Hugh Cutler, a retired former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette nation/world editor and one of Baker’s many proteges, in a recent Facebook tribute.

C-SPAN Producer Delia Rios, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter who called Baker “my hero,” remembered how as managing editor there in the early 1980s, Baker supported her reporting on a faulty nuclear power plant design, despite an intimidating visit to his office by briefcase-carrying power-company officials.

Baker’s crooked smile, wry humor and heart of gold reminded many of his underlings of the crusty “Lou Grant” character on the “Mary Tyler Moore show.” He never appreciated the comparison, however, at one point complaining of “snickering in the newsroom about a fat and balding Ed Asner look-alike.”

Paternal presence

Baker was born in 1933 in La Jolla, California, and raised mostly by his mother, to whom he credits his interest in reading, writing, music, art and human rights. For a man who later played a fatherly role in newsrooms, he had had little experience of his own father and stepfather and never had children of his own.  His parents divorced soon after he was born, and William Baker, his mother’s second husband, frequently traveled abroad as a Marine Corps officer, after which Baker said he abandoned the family.

Baker attended San Diego State University for two years, spending a single  semester at the University of California in Los Angeles before volunteering for the military. He served in the U.S. Army at Camp Chaffee in Arkansas for two years, after which he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut in 1959. “I was on my way to law school at Boston University when I took a summer job with a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, and quickly decided that I preferred journalism over law,” he wrote, in an informal autobiography. He received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1960.

After covering general news at the Minneapolis Star, he moved to Tokyo in 1963 to work for seven years for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, where among other posts he served as head of the Saigon Bureau. Returning to the U.S. in 1970, he served as editor and publisher of a small paper in Dickinson, North Dakota, followed by stints at the Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware and the San Francisco Examiner before becoming assistant managing editor at the Mercury News in 1978. He served as managing editor in San Jose from 1979-83.

Robert Hodierne, a retired former journalist, writer, editor, photographer and journalism professor, worked with Baker at three of those papers, beginning in the Stars and Stripes’ Saigon bureau.  The government-funded newspaper was free of military censorship, and some of its reporting was so controversial that the army’s chief public-relations officer took to calling it the “Hanoi Herald,” as Hodierne recalled. After he suggested that one of Hodierne’s stories, about a North Vietnamese defeat of U.S. infantry members, was treasonous, Baker summoned Hodierne, an enlisted man, to Tokyo to help him avoid being court-martialed.

Hodierne showed up after a night of drinking with a colleague, “unshaven, wearing clothes I'd been in for two days, hungover. That was John's first look at me, this guy who'd been causing so much trouble,” Hodierne recalled. “He just rolled his eyes and told me to go shower and shave. Nothing more was said.”

Ethical departures

Journalistic ethics dictated some of Baker’s many career transitions.

In 1975, he was fired from his job at the Wilmington News-Journal, then controlled by the E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, in what the New York Times called “a classic internal newspaper struggle over who controls the gathering and presentation of news: editors or a businessman board of directors with no news experience.”  The directors were reportedly unhappy with the paper’s “relatively liberal tone” and articles critical of the Du Pont family and company.

Hodierne, then city editor, was fired along with him, after his reporting raised questions about how Du Pont family members and real estate holdings had been underassessed.  “The result was raised taxes,” Hodierne recalled, adding, “John defended all of those stories.”

The News-Journal’s executive editor, assistant executive editor and at least one reporter subsequently resigned, after protesting an order to reduce the news budget by up to 15 percent.

Following the exodus, Delaware Gov. Sherman W. Tribbitt declared he was “gravely concerned that these actions could hamper the continued development of a free press in Delaware.”

In 1984, Baker abruptly resigned from the Mercury-News — a decision that Rios said “brought tears to the newsroom.” In an email to another former Mercury-News staffer, he explained that after a series of principled disputes with upper management," I was pretty fed up with being a part of newsroom management."

Baker moved to France, where he was hired as an editor for the International Herald Tribune and met his future wife, Micheline Bouiller, an administrative assistant.  Baker worked at the Herald Tribune until 1996 before retiring, after which the couple eventually moved to Decize, on the Loire River. He died in his garden after suffering a severe case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 90 years old.

Remarkably, Baker had no detectable online presence: no official bio, no website, no Facebook, Instagram or X account. In his younger years, he played tennis so well that he sometimes smoked while playing. He especially loved classical music, jazz and his wife.

He is survived by Bouiller, several nieces and nephews, and multitudes of aging journalists who remember him with love and gratitude.