SoJ Web Report | Nov. 14, 2010
Reported by Russell Jackson in Newswire, Fall 2010If anybody in the state of Indiana knows newspapering — especially old-school, hard-copy, small-town newspapering with an emphasis on local news — it’s George “Sonny” Carey, BA’60.
As owner of The Daily Clintonian, he proudly what his masthead points out is “the only daily newspaper in Parke and Vermillion counties,” and he’s been at it for more than 60 years.
When Carey was 10, he became a paperboy for the Clintonian, which is published in Vermillion County, home to Ernie Pyle.
“During summers, I worked in the back shop,” Clinton says. “I learned maintenance on every piece of equipment in the plant. I could run every piece, and I still can.”
The paper is published by his family’s business, Clinton Color Crafters, Inc. He also got involved in editorial for the paper while in high school and learned to shoot the news from then-editor Bill Waite, a former commercial photographer.
“Believe me, I got straight As in photojournalism at IU,” Carey says. Each summer while a student, he continued working at the Clintonian, even handling circulation manager tasks for a spell.
Carey’s ties to Hoosier journalism extend beyond the newspaper. His folks bought the Clintonian from its founders in 1936, with a contract written by newspaper titan Eugene C. Pulliam, who guaranteed two outstanding mortgages from Lafayette banks if they’d give the Careys a chance to turn the paper around.
Years later, when a young Sonny Carey was choosing between engineering and newspapering, he visited Purdue, which, he says, “didn’t seem interested in whether I attended or not” and IU, where he shared a Coke with long-time journalism school director John E. Stempel, another major figure in Indiana journalism.
“He was quite friendly,” Carey says now. “He impressed me as someone who really knew his stuff.”
Carey’s ties to IU journalism in particular remain strong as well. In journalism school, he learned about reporting, headline writing, layout and photojournalism.
“I use almost every bit of that every day of my life,” he said. “There’s very little of my time when I don’t do one or the other.”
Especially that focus on hard news. Carey notes that the Clintonian is holding its own in a brutal economic climate for print papers, and he credits that to the fact that “we do a very good job on local news coverage.”
Indeed, he says, he periodically publishes an ad that says, simply, “We put the NEWS in NEWSpapers.” That ad, he boasts, gains him a couple of new subscribers every time he runs it.
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