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Thomas Mitchell has a lifelong record of outstanding journalism, distinguishing himself as both an editor and columnist. As the newsroom leader of Nevada’s largest newspaper for two decades, he also did as much as any other journalist in the history of the state to defend and expand public access to government records.
Mitchell started his journalism career in 1973, at a daily newspaper in suburban Ft. Worth, Texas, where he was named city editor only six weeks after taking a job as a reporter. He was night city editor of the Miami News, when that newspaper closed in 1989, and joined the Las Vegas Review-Journal as its managing editor later that year.
“Las Vegas needed new blood, and I was intrigued by the management experience he already had,” said Sherman Frederick, then editor of the Review-Journal, who hired Mitchell to help lead the newsroom. Mitchell became the paper’s top editor three years later, when Frederick was named publisher.
Mitchell assigned reporters to stories long neglected in a city with a tradition of letting sleeping dogs lie. He demanded and published public payroll information, previously considered untouchable. He devised the Review-Journal’s Judicial Performance Evaluation, a groundbreaking and influential survey in which attorneys are asked to rate judges. And he personally supervised and expanded a special projects team that not only did investigative reporting but also took on unusual projects too time-consuming for reporters covering daily beats.
The paper also aggressively pursued information the government wanted to conceal, filing more than 20 court challenges during Mitchell’s tenure. They resulted in several groundbreaking rulings, including one in which the Nevada Supreme Court decided that government officials’ cell phone bills are public records.
Both Mitchell and Frederick left the Review-Journal in 2010. When Frederick co-founded Battle Born Media, he hired Mitchell as a freelancer. Until recently, Mitchell wrote most of the editorials and a regular column for the company’s mostly rural newspapers.
Mitchell was president of the Nevada Press Association in 1999-2000 and he has won too many awards for column and editorial writing to list in this space.
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