Inducted June 21, 2019
The late W. Harvey Hurt Jr. whose family were the longtime owners of The Wayne County News in Waynesboro, spent half a century in community journalism. The son of longtime publisher Harvey Hurt Sr., he attended Mississippi College and was president of the Mississippi Press Association in 1973. Hurt also served on the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Economic Council and promoted civic causes for community improvement through the newspaper.
He was the inaugural winner of the J. Oliver Emmerich Award for Editorial Excellence, first presented in 1974, for an opinion piece entitled “An Open Letter to the Employees of Wayne Manufacturing Co.” The “Oliver,” as it was known in its early days, was created to recognize the single best example of editorial writing in the state of Mississippi each year.
Hurt died in 1990 at the age of 79.
