The Best of Jackson Payne

Jack William Fuller was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 12, 1946. At the age of 16, he joined the The Chicago Tribune as a copy boy. He received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1968. After serving in the Army as a Vietnam correspondent for the newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes, he received a law degree from Yale University Law School in 1973.

He was hired as a general assignment reporter by The Tribune in 1973, but left in 1975 to become a special assistant to the United States attorney general, Edward H. Levi. He rejoined the newspaper in 1977 as a Washington correspondent. He was editorial page editor from 1981 to 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1986 for his commentary on constitutional and legal issues. He was named executive editor in 1987, vice president and editor in 1989, publisher in 1994, and executive vice president of the parent Tribune Publishing Co. in 1997. He retired from The Tribune in 2004 as its president.

His first novel, Convergence, was published in 1982. His other novels include Fragments, The Best of Jackson Payne, and One from Without. His nonfiction books include News Values: Ideas for an Information Age and What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism. He died from lung cancer on June 21, 2016 at the age of 69.

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