Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame inducting five for 2026

The Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame is growing by five this year as the 36th class of honorees will be inducted during Missouri Press Association’s (MPA) 160th Annual Convention and Trade Show in Columbia.

Inductees for 2026 are Linda Geist, founding owner of The Lake Gazette in Monroe City and current communications consultant for University of Missouri (MU) Extension; Mark Maassen, former advertising director for The Kansas City Star and former executive director of MPA; Jean Maneke, First Amendment lawyer and the first attorney for MPA’s legal hotline; Ken Newton, longtime newspaper reporter, editor and columnist at several Missouri newspapers, including the St. Joseph News-Press; and Mará Rose Williams, a reporter, editor and current senior opinion columnist for The Kansas City Star.

The Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame was established in 1991, and inductees or their families receive Pinnacle Awards in honor of the inductees’ service to the newspaper industry and their communities. Inductees’ plaques will join the permanent display of inductees in the MPA office in Columbia and in the student lounge in Lee Hills Hall at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Linda Geist

Linda Geist started in the news business as a 16-year-old at her hometown newspaper, The Monroe City News, where she made $1 an hour working 12 hours per week during the school year and 40 hours in summer and on breaks. As a teenager, she produced her first special edition, and as a student journalist, she was editor of her high school newspaper.

At the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Geist worked for the Columbia Missourian and the Columbia Daily Tribune. She also spent two weeks as a waitress, when she learned she was better in print. The first generation of her family to attend college, Geist won the Cowgill Blair Award for most potential in newspaper publishing.

Graduating in 1977, Geist became the community editor for the Hannibal Courier-Post before returning to Monroe City to work at the News and at one of the area’s shoppers. She was fired from the News in February 1997, but within two months printed the first edition of The Lake Gazette, which she would grow into one of the largest circulation weeklies in northeast Missouri at the time.

Between the Gazette’s founding and its sale to Lakeway Publishers in 2012, Geist guided it through a litany of events, including adopting new technologies, recovering from an F2 tornado in March 2006 that destroyed the newspaper’s building (but didn’t keep staff from publishing regular weekly editions and a special edition) and a temporary move to a beauty salon.

The following year marked Monroe City’s sesquicentennial, for which Geist’s efforts were recognized with two chamber of commerce awards, just a small portion of the many accolades achieved during her career. The whole celebration was kicked off with an open house for the Lake Gazette’s new permanent location.

After the newspaper, Geist joined MU Extension as a writer and is now a senior strategic communications consultant responsible for working with experts in ag-related fields to find, develop and write articles in a way that’s easy to understand for the lay reader. These articles appear in newspapers and magazines of all kinds both nationally and sometimes internationally.

Mark Maassen

Mark Maassen grew up reading the Osage County Unterrified Democrat in his hometown of Linn, along with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Jefferson City News-Tribune. That early foundation made it easy for him to choose attending (and graduating from in 1980) the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Earning his bachelor’s of journalism while focusing on advertising, Maassen also took an interest in public relations and wrote for the Columbia Missourian. The journalism foundation he developed at MU helped him formulate ideas and develop more effective sales presentations that he would put into effect at his first professional job at the Wichita Falls (Texas) Times Record News.

Maassen returned to Missouri to work in The Kansas City Star’s retail advertising department, where he would remain for more than 33 years. During that time, he held various management positions and helped guide The Star’s transition to more digital and interactive advertising projects. He was named group publisher over weekly community newspapers in Belton, Harrisonville, Lee’s Summit and Olathe, Kan., when The Star’s publishing group acquired them.

In 2013, Maassen served as president of the MPA Board of Directors, and in 2015, after leaving The Star, he was chosen as MPA’s next executive director. Chief among his battles for Missouri’s community newspapers in his role as executive director was the continued onslaught by lawmakers against printed public notices, an annual fight Maassen relished taking on even when it proved exhausting by the legislative session’s end because it reflected newspaper’s role in keeping public servants accountable to the people.

Displaying an unmatched enthusiasm for community newspapers, Maassen was instrumental in establishing the Rural Missouri Community Newspaper scholarship fund, which has set the groundwork for helping community newspapers find and attract J-school trained journalists who understand the value of small-town journalism.

Maassen retired from MPA’s executive director role in February 2025 but continues to be an advocate for journalism both through his alma mater and Missouri Press. At the beginning of 2026, he joined the Missouri Press Foundation’s Board of Directors where his leadership can continue to benefit Missouri’s newspapers.

Jean Maneke

Few people can say their career had as big an impact on as many newspapers, particularly in Missouri, as Jean Maneke. Most people will know Maneke as MPA’s first legal hotline attorney, but her newspaper roots are much deeper, beginning at her Springfield high school’s newspaper where she was editor.

Even before her first class at what is now Missouri State University, Maneke was hired as news editor of The Standard, the school’s student newspaper. By the end of that year she was working as a summer reporter for the Springfield News-Leader in its “society” department but moved to obituaries in the fall for the afternoon Leader-Press.

Graduating from college, Maneke became the newspaper’s federal court reporter but would leave for Kansas City a year later to begin law school. Even as a law student, she continued as a journalist at Milling & Baking News and eventually would write a monthly law column for a related trade publication in the grain industry.

Admitted to the Missouri Bar, Maneke began working at The Kansas City Times as a business journalist and legal columnist for two years before becoming legal counselor for a media and professional insurance company where, in addition to managing litigation for policy holders across the country, she also reviewed and approved numerous productions of Frontline, the PBS investigative documentary program.

In 1991, Maneke set out in private practice, adding media law to the work of the small firm. A year later she met with then MPA Executive Director Doug Crews to discuss the creation of a member hotline to provide counsel to reporters and editors on journalistic issues and by the end of 1992 the MPA Legal Hotline was established.

As the “attorney for Missouri newspapers,” Maneke worked to influence the making of state laws related to journalists and access to public records, working with publications of all sizes. Through her monthly column in Missouri Press News, appearances at MPA-related events and resources developed with the Missouri Bar, she taught reporters how to be better at their jobs but also helped train government workers (and their attorneys) how to handle requests for public information. Semi-retired since 2024, Maneke has been hard at work updating MPA’s guide to public notice requirements.

Ken Newton

A self-proclaimed product of southeast Missouri, Ken Newton earned his bachelor’s degree in English and journalism from Southeast Missouri State University. He joined the newspaper profession in 1980 at the former Bulletin-Journal in Cape Girardeau, leading a much smaller (some might call it “scrappy”) newsroom in coverage against the Thomson-owned Southeast Missourian.

Newton and crew’s work at the Journal ultimately led Thomson to rethink its investment in the region, marking its first sale of a U.S. newspaper. After the Rust family purchased the Missourian, they relied on Newton’s entrepreneurial vision, editorial excellence and steady leadership to bring together the fiercely competitive newsrooms into a cohesive force for the benefit of the region’s readers.

In 1994, Newton joined the St. Joseph News-Press, where he served in multiple senior roles for the Bradley family’s flagship newspaper, including city editor, then online editor and finally as senior reporter and columnist. It was common to see him providing guidance on writing and reporting to younger colleagues, and for several years, he authored a newsletter on writing that was widely shared and sparked staff improvement.

With the media landscape shifting, Newton was among those who saw the need to retain newspapers’ skillful writing and reporting but do more to meet the changing interests of audiences. As the News-Press converged operations with television operations in St. Joseph, Newton added multimedia journalist to his resume, a transition he embraced and excelled in.

At Newton’s retirement in 2020, he noted 2,426 personal columns were written in his 26 years at the News-Press. His weekly “Life Stories” column series, inspired by the News-Press’ motto “Yours for Life,” began in 2003 and highlighted unsung personalities throughout the newspaper’s readership area nearly every Thursday for 17 years.

In 2018, he was recognized with Northeast Missouri Press Association’s Merrill Chilcote Award, at the time saying, “I know we take a licking every once in a while, but you know, we're not fake. Every day, what you do matters. Chronicling the communities that you cover, that matters to people. And I'll never stop believing that what we do has an importance to the people we serve.”

Mará Rose Williams

Mará Rose Williams has been with The Kansas City Star since 1998, but her extensive career and portfolio of impressive work goes back to her start fresh out of Ohio University E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. The day after graduating with a degree in news writing and editing, she was working at The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W.V.

Williams wrote about almost everything in her five years at the Herald-Dispatch. On New Year's Day 1986, Williams covered the West Virginia Penitentiary riot during which six inmates were killed, including one who had been communicating with her in letters for weeks, forecasting the riot.

She then joined the Stamford Advocate in Connecticut, where she covered courts and schools for three years. While there, Williams wrote an award-winning piece on prostitution in the age of AIDS, spending weeks interviewing infected male and female prostitutes, drug addicts and unhoused people who sold sex for drugs.

Williams next role was at Newsday in her hometown of Long Island, N.Y., where she covered the Town of Brookhaven and Black activist the Rev. Al Sharpton. After two years, she went to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writing about courts, social service issues and education.

When she joined The Star, Williams covered K-12 education in eastern Jackson County. In 2000, her story about the underdeveloped teenage brain was picked up by news organizations across the country. In 2005, she was honored at the Missouri Board of Education Conference as a journalist who provided outstanding support for education.

In 2006, Williams became The Star’s higher education writer and four years later took over all education coverage on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas state line. She received the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship in 2008 and traveled to Kenya to teach and lecture on journalistic writing under a free press after a tribal massacre and a series of raids on newspapers.

Williams was the first journalist to write about racial tensions that led to the 2015 protests at the University of Missouri-Columbia and was the driving force behind The Star’s “Truth in Black and White” project, for which she received the Eleanor McClatchy Award for transformative journalism. As The Star’s assistant managing editor for race and equity, she produced the newspaper, radio and community engagement collaborative project “Voices of Kansas City,” which highlighted the city’s Black business owners, educators and activists. She is currently the newspaper's senior opinion columnist.

Missouri Press Association's 160th Annual Convention and Trade Show

Stay tuned to Missouri Press emails and our website, www.mopress.com/convention/, to receive updates on the 160th Annual Convention and Trade Show, including how to register to attend.

Planning to stay at the Broadway Hotel during Convention? Visit bit.ly/MPA160rooms to reserve your sleeping room at the MPA special rate before the Aug. 19 deadline.