Gary Cohn goes to his grave at 72, leaving behind the 1998 Pulitzer Prize he won at The Baltimore Sun and memories of that newspaper when it still had greatness about it.
He and reporter Will Englund and photographer Perry Thorsvik spent 18 months digging up a series of stories about the international shipbreaking industry, and the dangers faced by workers and the environmental impact of dismantling discarded ships.
Did you catch that little detail? Eighteen months they spent on one project.
The paper had Cohn working out of a shipyard in Wilmington, North Carolina, while Englund was digging up details from Brownsville, Texas.
Eighteen months, two reporters and a photographer working far from home.
Two years earlier, Cohn almost won another Pulitzer. He was a finalist for a series revealing how a CIA-trained Honduran army unit kidnapped, tortured and murdered political opponents in the 1980s — with the knowledge of the CIA.
This time, he and The Sun’s Ginger Thompson put together the series. They worked on it for 18 months. Cohn worked his sources in Washington, while Thompson was based in Latin America. She was The Sun’s Mexico City bureau chief.
Did you catch that little detail about time? They spent 18 months on the series. Two reporters, 18 months, far from home.
That’s when The Sun had more than 400 editorial staffers who worked out of Baltimore, Washington and bureaus all over the globe — including all over Maryland. Today, The Sun doesn’t even have a Baltimore County bureau.
At last count, the paper had about 60 newsroom people, not including those Fox 45 reporters now bringing all the cultural shallowness of local TV news to The Sun’s history of serious journalism.
In Cohn’s time, The Sun brought in the best and the brightest in journalism.
Cohn worked his way up to The Sun from reporting jobs at Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, The Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ginger Thompson later served as The New York Times Mexico City bureau chief. Will Englund left The Sun and went to The Washington Post.
These are all terrific newspapers – or were. They could afford to send reporters all over the world to uncover important stories.
Cohn leaves behind a marvelous track record, not only as a terrific reporter but as a mentsch. He was part of a whole bunch of first-rate people brought in when John Carroll and Bill Marimow were running the newsroom.
In those years, The Sun was one of the 10 best newspapers in America. In our time, when newspapers everywhere have been crippled by online competition, you could search for 18 months and not find 10 “best” newspapers in the whole country.
Gary Cohn’s passing is a reminder of newspapers when they still had greatness about them.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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