At first, Sara Fritz used journalism to expose the hazards of big money in congressional campaigns. Then she used journalism to help young people.
Fritz, a longtime Washington journalist and one-time publisher of Youth Today, died Oct. 16 from complications of a lung infection. She was 68.
In a town full of celebrity journalists, Fritz worked outside the spotlight. She was a no-nonsense investigative reporter who began her career on the copy desk at the Pittsburgh Press (where she and other women staffers had to retreat to the bathroom to smoke), then climbed the ladder of U.S. journalism: working as a Washington, D.C. correspondent for United Press International, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times.
“Sara was creative, dedicated and driven, as a journalist and as an editor,” said veteran journalist Sandy Bergo, who wrote for Youth Today when Fritz was publisher. “She helped pave the way for women in the profession and was a role model for younger reporters – both men and women.”
While her coverage included the standard Washington dramas – including the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration and the Whitewater scandal during the Clinton White House days –Fritz made her mark by finding stories that others weren’t chasing. Those stories compelled a writer for the American Journalism Review to list her in 2002 as one of the “unsung heroes” of Washington journalism.
Her projects included an exhaustive computer-based analysis of how congressional candidates spend campaign contributions. After looking at hundreds of thousands of expenditures by nearly 1,000 candidates – which included resort stays, art purchases and jobs for family members – Fritz and her colleague Dwight Morris concluded that the risk of campaign funding abuse stems from (as The Washington Post later put it) “the rivers of easy money that candidates wade in.” The project was published in book form: The Handbook of Campaign Spending and Gold-Plated Politics.
Fritz later won the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for best reporting on Congress for another project, “What’s Wrong with Congress?” Another project showed how prescription drug companies work the government approval process to keep prices high, at the expense of low-income senior citizens. She also served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Her most poignant writing was about her most painful personal loss. Her 11-year-old son Daniel hanged himself in 2000, a victim of undiagnosed depression. She later wrote that she considered killing herself after that, and observed that his death proved “a truism about parenthood that most of us try to deny. … When we lock the doors of our house at night, we realize how powerless we were to keep them [our children] safe.”
A few years after that tragedy, Fritz followed a common path among veteran journalists: moving on from the newsroom to make an impact through more direct endeavors. She served as executive director of the nonprofit The Faith & Politics Institute in Washington (dedicated to advancing “reflective leadership among members of Congress and congressional staff), then founded the Prince Edward Partnership for Success, a racial reconciliation program in southern Virginia that provides mentoring for youth.
In 2009, she saw a Web posting for a new publisher at Youth Today, whose publisher and co-founder, Bill Treanor, was retiring. Fritz saw it as chance to use her journalism background to help improve the lives of children and youth.
She became publisher in 2010, during a difficult period. Like many newspapers, Youth Today was hit hard by the rise of free Internet journalism; subscription and ad revenue were plummeting, and foundation grants (long the financial cornerstone of the company) were shrinking under the weight of an especially strong recession. Fritz downsized staff, focused more resources on Youth Today’s website, and shifted news coverage more toward the education field in hopes of attracting greater financial backing and advertising.
The strategy didn’t work; it remains unclear what strategy would have. Finding foundation funding for a nonprofit newspaper proved a far different challenge than ferreting out the hidden stories in campaign finance reports. Among other things, it required the sort of schmoozing for which Fritz, as a journalist, had earned respect for avoiding.
Fritz left the paper as its parent company, the American Youth Work Center, filed for bankruptcy. The newspaper and website eventually found a home at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Sustainable Journalism.
“Sara Fritz and her team did a great job of producing high-quality journalism for Youth Today,” said Leonard Witt, the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism. “It was that tradition that inspired us to acquire Youth Today and put it on the path to sustainability. And we are there now.”
Fritz was born on Dec. 16, 1944, in Pittsburgh, and graduated from Denison University in Ohio. She is survived by her husband, James A. Kidney, of Washington; daughter, Mary Kidney of Chicago; and two sisters.
Patrick Boyle is former editor of Youth Today, and is now communications director at the nonprofit Forum for Youth Investment.
Photo courtesy LinkedIn
