Baltimore Sun Editor Mary J. Corey died Tuesday. She was 49 and had breast cancer. “Fiercely devoted to the newspaper that she grew up reading as the youngest of three sisters in Cockeysville, she steadied the newsroom as the industry was contracting and adjusting to a new media landscape,” Jean Marbella writes in the Sun. The Sun hired Corey as an editorial assistant in 1987. She was named the newspaper’s director of content — “a role that was long titled editor when The Sun delivered news only through the newspaper,” the announcement read — in 2010.
Ms. Corey delighted in a clever turn of phrase and reveled in daily coverage of ongoing stories, whether it involved the corruption trial of a politician or the Ravens’ postseason runs. She was proud of The Sun’s investigative projects and the results they netted: changes in how Baltimore police reported rape cases, for example, and the recent overhaul of the city’s troubled speed camera program. She also led the development of the Sun Investigates blog to highlight the news organization’s watchdog reporting.
There are lots of remembrances of Corey on the Sun’s Facebook page. Jim Romenesko has a memo to employees from Sun publisher Tim Ryan, with the subject line “The saddest of news.”
Wall Street Journal Reporter Maya Jackson Randall also died Tuesday. She was 33 and had leukemia. Jackson Randall graduated from Howard University in 2000 and interned at the Journal’s Washington bureau, Gary Fields writes, before working at Money magazine and McGraw-Hill.
She joined Dow Jones Newswires in 2004 to cover energy regulation, and in 2008 she moved to the Treasury beat, where she played a key role in the bureau’s coverage of the financial crisis.
Two years later, she and a colleague, Michael R. Crittenden, received an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for a series of articles on how much money remained in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Their work forced the U.S. Treasury to increase its disclosure of how financial-rescue money was spent.
In late 2011, Ms. Jackson Randall broke the news of how President Barack Obama was moving toward making recess appointments to avoid congressional delays—a story that is still playing out in federal courts.
