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Jim Bellows was born in 1922 and died in 2009. He was generally considered as one of the highly influential figures in the American media of the 20th century. He was born into a wealthy family from Ohio and attended prep schools in Connecticut. He graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1944 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy. He also served a term in the US navy during World War 2. He took up a job as a press reporter for Columbus Ledger in the state of Georgia and landed the tougher assignments when his editor realized his talents.
His first big job as an editor was for the New York Herald Tribune in 1961. He also worked with the Los Angeles Times, Washington Star, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Entertainment Tonight, ABC News, USA Today, Prodigy and Los Angeles Daily News. He established himself with a reputation of being champion of the underdog newspapers. He used his innovative style of superfine sensationalism to challenge the established newspapers and he inspired a generation of younger writers with his eloquent, minimalist and still funny self-effacing style. His highly acclaimed memoir called The Last Editor was made into a documentary.
This documentary called "The Last Editor" chronicles the career and life of Jim Bellows. Jim Bellows was famous along with some other well known writers in the country because he challenged the status quo and was responsible for converting underdogs into champions. He took the beginners and upstarts from newspapers onto the TV and the Internet. Bellows was close to the top and was leading major metropolitan dailies at the time when the newspapers were the dominating media. This was the time of turbulence of civil rights movement, assassination of the Kennedy's and also Martin Luther King and the massive turmoil the whole nation felt about Vietnam War. Jim was also a news editor and producer at ABC TV. He was also one of the first major journalists to make use of computer-based information and news when he was the editor of Prodigy and then Excite.
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