Draft:Gene Foreman (journalist)

Gene Clemons Foreman (born November 20, 1934)] is an American journalist who managed the newsroom of The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1973 to 1998. Foreman is best known as the managing editor who teamed with The Inquirer’s executive editor, Gene Roberts, during The Inquirer's "Golden Age,’] The newspaper won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years, triumphed in an economic battle for survival over The Evening Bulletin, and under Knight Ridder ownership became a profitable enterprise and an influential regional paper.

Early Life and Early Career Foreman was born in Fremont, Ohio, the second of six children of Clemons Walter Foreman and Louise Vogel Foreman. He grew up in Wabash, Phillips County, Arkansas, where his family had bought a farm. By age 9 he was drawing newspaper front pages on his school notepad, and at 10 he and a schoolmate produced a five-day-a-week community paper.

When Foreman won a county spelling bee in 1948, it was his good luck to be interviewed by Clarence Taylor, editor of the weekly Phillips County Herald. Taylor, who would write that Foreman spelled “with the confidence of a politician without opposition,” asked what the eighth grader wanted to be when he grew up. Foreman answered: “I want your job.” The kind editor responded by giving him a nonpaying job writing social notes from his community in Wabash. That led to summer jobs as a proofreader and apprentice reporter at the daily Helena World during high school and to college reporting internships at the Memphis Press-Scimitar in Memphis, Tenn., and the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, Ark.

Foreman received his degree in journalism from Arkansas State College (now Arkansas State University) in 1956. After graduation, the Arkansas Gazette hired him as a full-time reporter.

Foreman received an Army commission as a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Arkansas State and served six months on active duty in 1956-1957. After finishing first in his class of 74 lieutenants in the field artillery officer basic course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he worked with howitzer crews on the firing range. He then spent 11 years in Reserve units, ending his service as a major.

Career After leaving the Army, Foreman spent five years at the Arkansas Gazette, where as a reporter he had a supporting role in covering the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957. He became the Gazette’s assistant city editor in 1958 and its state editor in 1960. He moved to The New York Times as a copy editor in 1962, but he returned to Arkansas during the printers’ strike that December closed The Times and other New York dailies for four months, By this time Foreman had moved into newsroom management. He had accepted a job as managing editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial and leader of its 20-member staff. After five years in Pine Bluff, he moved back to Little Rock in 1968 to become managing editor of the afternoon Arkansas Democrat with a staff of 60.

In 1971, Foreman was hired as executive news editor of Newsday on Long Island, overseeing final editing and production of the daily editions. After a little over a year in that job, he accepted an offer from Gene Roberts, the new executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to be Roberts’s second in command. The two editors formed a partnership that reversed the fortunes of what had been one of the country’s worst metropolitan dailies. Roberts focused on competitive strategy and news coverage, devoting particular attention to what became the paper’s signature enterprise reporting. Drawing on his experience in revamping the two Arkansas dailies, Foreman built the Inquirer’s editing infrastructure, oversaw quality control, and directed day-to-day operations.

After Roberts retired from The Inquirer in 1990 Foreman continued to manage the newsroom for the next eight years. During this period Inquirer staff members won an additional Pulitzer Prize, making a total of 18 in Foreman’s 25-year tenure.

Foreman retired in 1998 and joined the journalism faculty at Penn State University as its inaugural Larry and Ellen Foster Professor. He established the Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, bringing dozens of top reporters to the campus to share their experiences with students. He retired from full-time teaching in 2006 but continued to manage the writers’ conference, which was renamed the Foster-Foreman Conference at the Fosters’ request.

Foreman was president of the Associated Press Managing Editors (renamed the Associated Press Media Editors) in 1990 and was a board member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (renamed the News Leaders Association) from 1995 to 1998.

Foreman received a lifetime achievement award from the Philadelphia chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence from the Pennsylvania News Media Association, and the Larry Foster Award for Integrity in Public Communication from the Page Center at Penn State. A scholarship fund in Foreman’s name was established at Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.

Books as co-author or co-editor After his retirement as a professor, Foreman created a textbook on professional ethics. The Ethical Journalist was published by John Wiley & Sons in 2009, and subsequent editions came out in 2015 and 2022. The 2022 edition was coauthored by three former Inquirer colleagues: Emilie Lounsberry, Dan Biddle, and Rich Jones.

Foreman also wrote Roots and Wings: My Memories of a Childhood That Led to a Career in News, a memoir of his growing-up years in Ohio and Arkansas, as a private project for family and close friends.