Kenneth P. Johnson

Kenneth Parker Johnson (August 24, 1934 – November 2, 2008) was an American newspaper editor. Johnson was best known for his efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to build the Dallas Times Herald into one of the nation's most respected newspapers, which ultimately failed when the paper was purchased by its rival The Dallas Morning News in 1991 and promptly shut down.

Johnson was born on August 24, 1934, in Huntington, West Virginia, and graduated in 1953 from high school in Bristol, Tennessee. After completing high school, he took a job as a copyboy with the Bristol Herald Courier of Bristol, Virginia. He attended what is now East Tennessee State University. He worked for the newspaper while he was in college, serving in a succession of posts as sports writer, general assignments reporter, city editor and night editor. After graduating from college in 1960, he was hired as the chief copy editor of the Savannah Morning News in Georgia, and was promoted to city editor and was named managing editor of the paper at age 25, within six months of his hire at the Morning News.

Johnson moved to Washington, D.C., in 1965, where he spent a year as an assistant to George Elliott Hagan, a Democratic Party member of Congress from Georgia. He was hired as night city editor by The Washington Post in 1966, and followed with a series of promotions to news editor, night managing editor, assistant production director, assistant general manager and vice president for operations. The article's subject, Norman J. Rees, committed suicide by a gunshot wound in the head after the article was printed.

In 1985, Johnson formed Westward Communications together with Will D. Jarrett, his former editor at the Times Herald, which bought a series of 41 newspapers and nine shoppers in Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana and Texas, primarily in small towns. The business bought newspapers with printing presses and then followed by buying surrounding papers that could be printed on the presses already purchased, in a hub and spoke model. The group was sold for an estimated $80 million in 1997, with Mary Walton of American Journalism Review estimating that Johnson and his partner each netted as much as $25 million from the deal, though these numbers were unconfirmed.

Johnson died at age 74 on November 2, 2008, in Dallas of a heart infection at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.