Conservative journalist Paul Jenkins, who went from being an Associated Press reporter to becoming managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times, editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet and finally a columnist at the Anchorage Daily News, has died. That is according to his former longtime colleague Robert Dillon, who announced it on Facebook. The announcement was corroborated by a family member.
Jenkins was at the Anchorage Times during the intense newspaper war between the conservative Times and the liberal Anchorage Daily News. The Times eventually lost that war and Jenkins became the editor of a page temporarily dedicated to the Times‘ conservative opinions, called Voice of the Times, which used to be published in the Anchorage Daily News as part of an agreement between the papers, when the Times folded in 1992.
In December, Howard Weaver, former editor of the Anchorage Daily News during the newspaper war, also died. Like Jenkins, he was in his mid-70s.
Jenkins, named for his father, was a quiet man who kept his personal life to himself, but wrote a eulogy for his own father in 2015 that revealed much about himself as a man, and also showed what elegance he possessed as a writer: