Mass Media Research Guide

The Society’s Historic Missourians website contains biographies of a number of journalists, newspaper editors, and radio personalities.

• Lucile Bluford - Lucile Bluford was a well-respected editor and publisher of the Kansas City Call and a civil rights activist.


• Jack Buck - Jack Buck was one of Missouri’s sports broadcasting pioneers. As the main play-by-play announcer for KMOX radio, Buck was known as the “Voice of the St. Louis Cardinals” for nearly half a century.


• Harry Caray - Harry Caray was one of the most famous professional baseball announcers in the history of the sport. Although long associated with the Chicago Cubs, he first called St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on radio and television for more than twenty-five years.

• Joseph Charless -Joseph Charless was a printer who founded the St. Louis Gazette, the first newspaper published west of the Mississippi River.


• George Creel – George E. Creel was a journalist, politician, and author. He and his friend Arthur Grissom published their own paper, the Independent, launching it in 1899.


• Walter Cronkite – Walter Cronkite was one of the first broadcast journalists on American television. He is best remembered as the anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981.


• John Newman Edwards – John Newman Edwards was a pro-Confederate journalist who helped create the image of Jesse James as a heroic bandit.


• Martha Gellhorn - Martha Gellhorn was a journalist and writer who became a noted war correspondent.


• Mary Paxton Keeley - Mary Paxton Keeley was the first woman graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.


• Mary Margaret McBride - Mary Margaret McBride was a writer and journalist who became one of the most popular radio broadcasters of the 1930s to the 1950s. She was known as “The First Lady of Radio.”


• Joseph Pulitzer - Joseph Pulitzer created a journalistic style that is still in use today. Mixing thought-provoking editorials and political news with crime and public-interest stories, Pulitzer made the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World profitable papers.


• Carl Schurz – Carl Schurz edited and co-owned the Westliche Post, a popular German-language newspaper in St. Louis, in 1867. From 1881 to 1884 he edited and eventually co-owned the Evening Post newspaper.


• Franz Sigel – Franz Sigel was a German-born Union general during the Civil War. After the war, Sigel published a German-language newspaper in Baltimore before going to New York City in 1867. In 1895 he published a newspaper, the New Yorker Deutches Volksblatt. He was the editor of the New York Monthly from 1897 until his retirement in 1900.


• Sara Lockwood Williams – Sara Lockwood Williams was a successful and influential journalist from Missouri. She was not only the first woman professor at a journalism school in the United States, but also the first woman reporter for the St. Joseph Gazette and one of the earliest female graduates from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.


• Walter Williams – Walter Williams was one of the most influential journalists in American history. An accomplished newspaper editor, he is best known for founding the world’s first school of journalism at the University of Missouri.


• Harriett Woods – Harriett Woods was the first female lieutenant governor of Missouri, a Democratic politician, and an advocate for women’s rights. A trailblazer for women in state and national politics, Woods inspired a new generation of female politicians in America.