Two men with ties to Logan County were among seven new members inducted into the 30^th class of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame at a luncheon April 8 in Lexington.
They are Jack Lyne, a native of Russellville who has had a 25-year career as a top executive of “Site Selection,” an Atlanta-based magazine, focused on corporate location strategies, and Al Cross, a native of Albany who worked for the News-Democrat and Logan Leader and edited a sister paper of the same company in Leitchfield before beginning a 26-year career at the Louisville Courier-Journal.
After 17 years as editor in chief of “Site Selection,” Lyne is now executive editor of interactive publishing and executive vice president of the parent company, Conway Data, of which his wife Laura C. Lyne, is president. Earlier in his 40-year career he wrote a book about integration issues in the Louisville schools, where he was director of information, and delivered on-air commentary for CNN and Kentucky Educational Television. He has won numerous awards in business journalism and the Golden Lamp, a high honor in educational journalism.
Recipient of a B.A. and Master’s degree from the University of Kentucky, which sponsors the Hall of Fame of Journalism, Lyne worked for several years as editor of a newsletter for the Louisville public schools before they merged with the Jefferson County schools. He is the son of the late James C. Lyne and the late Lucy Linton Locke of Russellville, who were both active in Democratic politics. His father was both county attorney and commonwealth attorney. His mother was the daughter of a county judge, J.T. Linton, who also served in the Legislature, as did her mother after her husband died. Jack’s mother was the niece of a legendary Logan County politician, Emerson (Doc) Beauchamp, who held elective offices ranging from sheriff to agriculture commissioner, state treasurer and lieutenant governor.
Now director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and an assistant professor at UK, Cross is one of the best known journalists in Kentucky. After making his first appearance on KET’s Comment on Kentucky when he was 21 , he went on to roll up more guest appearances than any other reporter in the three decades that Al Smith, who was then the publisher in Russellville, was producing and hosting the show. For 15 of those years, before he left for the job at UK, Cross was the Courier-Journal’s political reporter.
In the mid 1970’s, just after he graduated from Western Kentucky University, he was editing a struggling weekly paper in Monticello when Smith hired him as assistant managing editor of the Russellville papers. Three years later, and living in Leitchfield, he was recruited by the Courier-Journal and went on to share a coveted Pulitzer Prize for that paper’s coverage of the Carrolton school bus crash, a national disaster, in 1989. He was president of the national Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) 2001-02, the only Kentuckian to hold this position.
Cross and Lyne were preceded into the Hall of Fame by broadcaster Don Neagle of WRUS AM , in 2006, Russellville native Alice Allison Dunnigan, who was a pioneer in minority journalism, and former Russellville publisher Al Smith, in 1981.