Edward D. Casey Elected to Hall of Fame

Edward D. Casey, who served as executive editor of Capital-Gazette Newspapers for 30 years, has been elected to the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Newspaper Hall of Fame. When he is inducted in March, Casey will join 35 other newspaper men and women who have been similarly honored over the years and whose careers span nearly three centuries.

Casey was executive editor for Capital-Gazette Newspapers, which includes The Capital, Maryland Gazette, Bowie Blade-News, Crofton Crier and West County News from 1971 to 2001. He continues to serve as the newspaper’s editorial page editor.

“Ed fought strongly for principle and accountability through the editorial voice of The Capital and represented what we would all like to see in an editor,” said Tom Marquardt, current executive editor of The Capital and a member of the MDDC Board of Directors.

Casey served as president of the MDDC Press Association in 1989-90. Under his leadership, the association became actively engaged in many new fields, including freedom of information, which continues to be a priority today.

“Ed’s contributions to MDDC are just as significant as his contributions to Maryland journalism,” said Marquardt. “He helped to turn a big corner in the organization’s history by encouraging the involvement of professional journalists. MDDC is much stronger today as a result of this change.”

Casey led a campaign for financial support of a group of Maryland editors who successfully sought improvements in the state’s open meetings law, recalls Jim Keat, a retired editor of the Baltimore Sun and member of the MDDC FOI subcommittee.

“It was the first time in anyone’s memory that MDDC had actively participated in a freedom of information project like this, and it was the first step toward the energetic, professional FOI program we have today,” said Keat. “Without Ed it would never have happened.”

Immediately prior to joining Capital-Gazette Newspapers, Casey was the editor of the Daily Advance in Dover, NJ, for six years. He began working in newspapers as a sports reporter in 1957 at the Binghamton (NY) Press. This was followed by stints as sports editor for the Endicott (NY) Bulletin and city editor and managing editor of the Binghamton Sun-Bulletin. He served as a Pulitzer Prize juror in 1986.

“It’s great to have a way for the association to honor a lifetime of achievement in journalism, and Ed Casey richly deserves to be so recognized,” said Hall of Fame Committee Chair Jim Flood, Sr., publisher and chairman of the Dover Post Company. The committee’s recommendation of Casey was unanimously approved by the MDDC Board of Directors.

The MDDC Newspaper Hall of Fame is located in the Journalism Building at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park. Its honorees come from rural weekly papers and big-city dailies – from William Parks who published Maryland’s first newspaper, the Maryland Gazette of Annapolis, before the Revolutionary War, to H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Evening Sun, to the Association’s first female president, Gertrude Poe, former editor of the Laurel Leader, to Sam Lacy, the longtime sports editor of the Afro-American Newspapers, to Washington Post former editor Ben Bradlee and former publisher Katharine Graham.

The MDDC Press Association is a nonprofit organization of 161 newspapers whose membership consists of all of the daily newspapers and most of the non-daily newspapers in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia.