Maine journalists inducted into hall of fame

BAR HARBOR – Three new members were inducted Friday night into the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame.

The 2006 inductees were Bob Saunders, former managing editor of the Journal Tribune in Biddeford; the late Dwight E. Sargent, a Colby College graduate who was an editorial writer and curator of the Nieman Foundation; and the late Sheila Tenggren, who was editor and publisher of the weekly Lincoln News for 24 years.

A selection committee receives nominations each year and selects newspaper professionals who have made lasting career contributions to the craft. Established in 1998, the MPA Hall of Fame currently has 37 members.

Saunders was a reporter, a feature writer, the editorial page editor and the managing editor during 29 years with the Journal Tribune.

He was hired by the Sanford Tribune as a staff writer in 1975, and was working there in 1977 when the Sanford Tribune and the Biddeford-Saco Journal merged to create the Journal Tribune.

In 1983, the MPA named him its Journalist of the Year, based on his political reporting and feature writing. He was named managing editor in 1994, and in 1996 the Journal Tribune was named Newspaper of the Year in its category by the New England Newspaper Association.

Saunders left the Journal Tribune in 2004.

Tenggren acquired the Lincoln News after the death of her fiance, G. Daniel Aiken, in 1981.

Over the next 24 years she did everything for the paper, from reporting to photography to editing to running the business. In the newspaper’s story about her death in April 2005, she was called “Caring. Controversial. Compassionate. Loud. Opinionated. Kind. Brash.”

Tenggren, who was 66 when she died, served on the MPA board of directors in the 1990s and was the association’s president from 1994 to 1995.

Sargent began his journalism career in Maine and went on to become editorial page editor for papers in New York and Boston and curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. He was a founding member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and the inspiration for Colby’s Elijah P. Lovejoy Award.

When Sargent was a Nieman Fellow in 1951, he formed the idea for the Lovejoy Award. Lovejoy, who graduated from Colby in 1826, was an abolitionist publisher who died in 1837 when a mob attacked his press.

Sargent, who lived in Pelham, N.Y., died on April 4, 2002, at the age of 85.