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A resident of Reno from age five, Dennis Myers cut a wide swath through Nevada media and politics. In the late 1960s, he attended the University of Nevada-Reno where he wrote for The Sagebrush student newspaper and covered the Nevada Legislature for Reno and Las Vegas radio stations.
For many years, he reported for KTVN TV-2 and KOLO TV-8 but his heart remained in print.
He was a Sparks Tribune staff writer and a contributing editor at Reno Magazine. He devoted the last 15+ years of his professional life to the alternative weekly Reno News & Review, where he became an award-winning reporter and news editor.
In 2015, Myers and his colleagues received the Reno-Sparks NAACP’s highest honor for their reporting on civil rights, human rights and police shootings, much of which went viral.
He continued as a contributor to the Las Vegas Business Press, the Pahrump Valley Times and many others.
A lifelong researcher, he co-authored “Uniquely Nevada,” a children’s history textbook, and contributed to the historical volumes “The Mythical West” and “Covering the Courts in Nevada.”
He always championed progressive values.
“Myers was as consistent a critic as any conservative when it came to Nevada’s rampant corporate welfare proliferation and increasingly regressive taxation,” wrote his friend and fellow journalist Andrew Barbano. “He was a champion of the rights of workers, unions, minorities and women.”
Myers also took a couple of brief detours into politics. In the mid-70s, he served as state chair of the Nevada Young Democrats and was a Democratic nominee for a Reno state senate seat in 1976. He also briefly left journalism in 1987-88 when Secretary of State Frankie Sue Del Papa appointed him as her chief deputy.
Myers became a U.S. Army military policeman while serving in Europe.
He never stopped being a policeman, speaking “truth to power,” the title of the News & Review cover story about his life.
He died in August 2019, at the age of 70.
More on Dennis Myers:
Portraits of the Newsman, Reno News & Review
