Mike Pride: He Transformed the Concord Monitor Into a Prizewinning Paragon of Regional Journalism

From a New York Times obit by Sam Roberts headlined “Mike Pride, Who Proved a Regional Newspaper Could Work, Dies at 76”:

Mike Pride, who transformed the New Hampshire newspaper The Concord Monitor into a prizewinning paragon of regional journalism, mentoring generations of reporters and editors, defying the trope about the dying small-town newspaper and exerting an outsize impact on his profession, died in Palm Harbor, Fla.

As The Monitor’s managing editor from 1978 to 1983 and its editor until he retired in 2008, Mr. Pride won the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for overseeing The Monitor’s eloquent coverage of the death of a hometown heroine, the astronaut and teacher Christa McAuliffe, in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.