Highton pen slows

After a quarter century, Sparks Tribune columnist Jake Highton is calling it quits. The journalism professor emeritus, for whom the term irascible was invented, sent a message to Trib editor Dan Eckles:

“I cannot part from the Trib without thanking the paper for 25 years of amazing publication of my column. I say amazing because it was radical, leftist, atheistic and shouted my weekly outrage. Few other newspaper editors in America would have printed it because it was so far from the thinking of most of their readers. For its publication I will always owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Sparks Tribune.”

Highton, an occasional RN&R contributor, is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, editorial writer for the Detroit News, copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, and author of numerous books, including Nevada Newspaper Days and the journalism textbook Reporter. Several collections of his Tribune columns, too, have been published in book form. He created the Highton Scholarship Endowment for journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno.