New in the collection: promo pinback for editor’s biopic

Pinback button promoting The Newspaperman film

 

This pinback button rewarded Kickstarter donors supporting a documentary-still-in-progress on Pikeville native and UNC alum Gene Roberts, one of American journalism’s great editors. (His jowliness gave him the irreverent newsroom nickname “The Frog.”)

“In 1972,” the filmmakers write, “Roberts left a position with the New York Times to join the struggling Philadelphia Inquirer as executive editor….The Inquirer had not won a single Pulitzer Prize in its 150 years of existence — but just three years later the paper won a Pulitzer for national reporting. Over the next 15 years it would win 16 more Pulitzers….”

Roberts’s father was himself a newspaperman (and preacher!) in Goldsboro, whose accomplishments included coining “Hoover cart.”