KEENE, N.H. – James D. Ewing, co-owner of The Keene (N.H.) Sentinel for nearly four decades, died Monday at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene after a brief illness. He was 85.

During his tenure as publisher, the newspaper successfully campaigned for a wide range of causes including land-use planning, freedom of information and public services for the needy.

After leaving day-to-day newspapering in the mid-1980s, he helped launch the International Center for Journalists, a Washington-based training institute for journalists around the world.

Ewing, a native of St. Louis, grew up in New Jersey and the Bronx, N.Y.

After graduation from Princeton in 1938, Ewing studied at Harvard Law School, but left after his first year to teach Latin and Greek at Taft School in Watertown, Conn.

In 1941 he moved to Washington where he became a mediation officer for the National War Labor Board. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943 after marrying Ruth Dewing of Cambridge, Mass., a civilian mediator on the board.

After the war, the Ewings and a friend bought the daily Bangor Evening Commercial in Maine.

Among other things, the Commercial helped launch the career of Edmund Muskie, a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state who went on to become governor, U.S. senator and secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter.

But the community was not big enough to support the Commercial and the Bangor Daily News. The Ewings closed the Commercial in 1954, and in partnership with another friend, bought The Keene Sentinel.

In 1993, the Ewings sold the Sentinel to a nephew, Thomas M. Ewing.

In addition to his wife, Ewing is survived by two daughters, Carolyn Cobelo of Taos, N.M., and Tsultrim Allione of Pagosa Springs, Colo.; a son, Thomas S. of Leverett, Mass.; a brother, George of Canandaigua, N.Y.; nine grandchildren and nieces and nephews.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.