TownNews.com CEO Marc Wilson, winner of Inland Press Association's Ray Carlsen Distinguished Service Award, has led a long, varied and curious career. He will receive the award Oct. 26 at Inland Press Association's annual convention.
He graduated as the SDX outstanding graduate from the University of Colorado School of Journalism in 1973. He worked for three dailies in Colorado before joining the Associated Press, where he worked in five bureaus. Then he and his wife and a partner bought a weekly newspaper, where he started a company that today provides the most widely used content management system to U.S. daily newspapers.
His professional career started in Colorado, where he worked as a reporter for the Boulder Camera, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, before he joined the AP. With the AP in Denver, Marc covered the Western White House of President Ford. He wrote widely-used stories about historic battles over Mexican land-grant rights in southern Colorado.
In Arkansas, he covered the Vigil for the Second Coming of Christ in Grannis, Arkansas. He was the last reporter to interview famous and infamous Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus about the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis. He helped cover some of the worst tornado stories in history, and the funeral of Watergate figure Martha Mitchell. While working on special assignment for APME out of Little Rock, Marc was run out of Mexico by a gun-wielding Mexican doctor who sold drugs banned in the U.S. to American arthritis patients.
In the Chicago bureau, he was the lead AP reporter covering attempts by the American Nazi Party to march on Skokie, Illinois, home of more World War II Holocaust survivors than anyplace except Israel. Marc was the reporter who discovered that the head of the American Nazi Party's father was Jewish.
He was the first to report that mass murderer John Wayne Gacy dressed up as a clown and entertained at children’s parties. And he was one of just a handful of journalists who reached the crash site of the American Airlines flight 191 that crashed near O'Hare Airport, killing 271 passengers on May 25, 1979–the single worst air crash in U.S. history.
The AP promoted Marc to correspondent in Boise, then Assistant Chief of Bureau and News Editor for Texas.
In 1983, Marc and his wife, Ginny, and partner Rob Dalton bought the Bigfork Eagle, a 1,950-circulation weekly in unincorporated Bigfork, Montana. The Eagle became one of the first newspapers in the country to convert to desktop publishing using Macintosh computers and printers. The Eagle was also one of the first weeklies to convert from a wet darkroom to a digital darkroom. These technical projects got Marc on the speakers' circuit at press association conventions around the country. The Eagle won the Thomas Dimsdale Sweepstakes Award as the best weekly in Montana five of the 14 years the Wilsons published the paper.
In 1989, with the help of the Montana Newspaper Association, Marc started TownNews.com (then called the International Newspaper Network), which was an effort to start a wire service for weekly newspapers. The company installed modems at mostly weekly newspapers in Montana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The service delivered content electronically for the first time ever to hundreds of weekly newspapers. Marc also served six years as president of the Montana Newspaper Advertising Service, nine years on the board of the Montana Newspaper Association, and five years as the Montana state chair to the National Newspaper Association.
In 1995, Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, bought 51 percent interest in TownNews.com. "How would you like a million dollars and a staff of 10," a Lee executive asked Marc, who then had a staff of one and close to $10 in reserves.
Five years later, Lee's COO Mary Junck asked Marc to move near Lee headquarters to consolidate most of Lee's Internet services under the TownNews.com umbrella.
TownNews.com now serves over 1,700 media outlets in the United States, Canada–and the only daily newspaper in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.
The Reynolds Journalism Institute recently completed a study and reported that TownNews.com's BLOX system is the most widely used Content Management System among U.S. daily newspapers, reaching 57 percent of the nation's dailies.
While growing TownNews.com, Marc also found time to research and write Hero Street U.S.A., which was published in 2009 by the University of Oklahoma Press. The book was honored as the best history book of the year by the International Hispanic Literacy Council.
Marc served seven years on the board of the Inland Press Association, and served on several Inland Press committees, including the Minority Fellowship and Technology committees.
