John Sawyer Carroll

John S. Carroll was the editor of the "Los Angeles Times" and "The Baltimore Sun." Carroll was widely credited with orchestrating the Los Angeles Times' dramatic turnaround after the publication suffered through difficult times in the 1990s. Carroll set a standard of ethical probity and journalistic excellence. As a reporter, he served in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Washington. Before Carroll took the helm at the Times, he was editor and senior vice president of "The Baltimore Sun" and editor and vice president of the "Lexington Herald-Leader." During his tenure in Lexington, he spearheaded an investigative series of reports titled "Cheating Our Children," which exposed flaws in Kentucky's public-education system. The newspaper won two awards for the series, which helped lead to the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990. During Carroll's five years at the "Los Angeles Times," the newspaper earned 13 Pulitzer Prizes, compared to eight in the 1990s. The Pulitzer streak was considered to indicate a dramatic improvement in quality at the paper. Named editor of the year by the National Press Foundation in 1998, Carroll has the distinction of having personally edited Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at four different newspapers. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Visiting Journalism Fellow at Oxford University, and he served as the Knight Visiting Lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School in 2006. Carroll has received honorary doctorates from Haverford College, Lawrence University, Pennsylvania State University, and Transylvania University. Carroll passed away in June, 2015.