John Carroll (journalist)

John Sawyer Carroll (January 23, 1942 – June 14, 2015) was an American journalist and newspaper editor, known for his work as the editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun.

John S. Carroll was born in New York City on January 23, 1942, to Wallace Carroll, the editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, and the former Margaret Sawyer. The family lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, until John was about 13, when they moved to Washington, D.C., where his father began working with the New York Times bureau. In 1963, the younger Carroll was graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in English.

When he was at Haverford, he and two friends were arrested and jailed when they entered the playing field during a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants in an attempt to shake the hand of baseball player Willie Mays, according to Norman Pearlstine, a friend and classmate, later editor-in-chief of Time magazine.

Carroll was married to Lee Huston of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1985. After he left the Los Angeles Times in 2005, he and his wife returned to Lexington, where he died in his home on June 14, 2015. According to his wife, the cause was Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which had been diagnosed about six months before his death. He was also survived by sisters Margaret, Posie and Patricia Carroll, daughters Maggie Vaughan and Katita Strathmann and stepchildren Huston, Griggs and Caroline Powell.

Carroll was regarded as "one of the most influential newspaper editors of his era" who saw journalists "almost as public servants and a free press as essential to a self-governing nation."

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