Obituaries

James B. “Jim” Boone Jr., founder and chairman of the board of Boone Newsmedia, Inc., died Feb. 13 at UAB Hospital-highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, after a brief illness. He was 87. Boone, a lifelong newspaperman, succeeded his father, Buford Boone, as publisher of The Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News in 1968 and built over the following half-century a community media company that now owns or manages 91 newspapers and related print and digital products in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. The company, which had operated as Boone Newspapers, Inc., since its founding, was renamed Boone Newsmedia, Inc., in 2022 to reflect its considerable progress in serving readers and advertisers both digitally and in print.

Craig Selby, longtime publisher and general manager of Charleston Newspapers, the former parent company of The Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail, died Feb. 6 after a long illness. He was 77. Selby spent his entire career at Charleston Newspapers, starting in 1968 as an advertising salesman shortly after earning a degree in journalism from West Virginia University. He was later named the company’s personnel director before advancing to assistant general manager, vice president and general manager, assuming the role of publisher in 1992.

Hollis Jefferson “Jeff” Nesmith, Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked for The Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution and later the Washington, D.C., bureau of the newspaper’s parent company, Cox Enterprises, died Jan. 13 of cancer. He was 82.

Joyce Dopkeen, who in 1973 became the first woman to be hired by The New York Times as a full-time staff photographer, beginning a 35-year career with the newspaper, died Jan. 31 in Rockville, Maryland. She was 80. Her death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure, her brother, Jonathan Dopkeen, said.

Victor S. Navasky, who for 27 years as either editor or publisher commanded the long-running left-leaning magazine The Nation, and who also wrote the book “Naming Names,” a breakthrough chronicle of the Hollywood blacklisting era, died Jan. 23 in Manhattan. He was 90.

Virgil Shipley, a longtime photographer and reporter for the Mount Vernon (Ohio) News, died Jan. 17. According to Country Court Skilled Nursing Home in Mount Vernon, Shipley, 95, passed away, after an undisclosed illness. He had worked for the News since 1956, according to former colleague Corby Wise, the paper’s former advertising director.

Gwen Knapp, a prominent sports reporter and columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The San Francisco Chronicle and most recently an editor on the sports desk of The New York Times, died Jan. 20 in Manhattan. She was 61. The cause was lymphoma, her sister Susan Knapp Mcclements said.

John Lampson, 86, a native of Jefferson and Ashtabula County, died Jan. 14 in his apartment in Mentor, Ohio, with his wife Marilyn by his side, following a brief illness. Lampson served as president and publisher of Gazette Newspapers from 1985 to 2005, later becoming the publisher emeritus, which he served until his death. Lampson became the fourth generation of the family to work at Gazette Newspapers starting in 1963 after his discharge from the Army.