Larry Jinks

Larry Jinks died on Sunday 8 November 2026 at his home in Los Gatos, California, aged 97. His wife, Claire Jinks, said he had entered hospice care after compression fractures in his lower spine left him partially paralysed. His death was reported on 9 November 2026 by the Mercury News and The Press Democrat in an obituary by Clark Hoyt.

Tributes came from across the newspapers he had shaped. Carl Hiaasen said, "After a job interview with Larry Jinks, you didn't want to work anywhere else." Tony Ridder said Jinks had come to work as his partner "to make the San Jose Mercury into one of the best newspapers in the country." Bea Hines said, "I am forever indebted to him," and Dave Barry said, "The news business has lost one of its best."

He is survived by his wife, his children Laura Cervelli and Dan Jinks, his stepson Beau Backus, a sister, Jean Newsum, and three grandchildren. Funeral or memorial plans had not been announced when his death was reported.

Robert Larry Jinks was born on 26 January 1929 in Mount Pleasant, Texas, to Leon Carlton Jinks, a county agricultural agent, and Mary Jean (Cunnyngham) Jinks, a high school English teacher. The family struggled through the Great Depression and moved often before his father became a farmer in Arkansas, where Larry and his older brother, Leon, worked alongside him in the fields.

He caught the newspaper bug in the fifth grade and started a handwritten neighbourhood paper that summer. "I'm not sure anyone ever read it," he later wrote in a private memoir for his family. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1950, worked at a small afternoon paper in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and then volunteered for the Army during the Korean War, serving as a Signal Corps officer without seeing combat. He later earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

After the Army, Jinks became a police reporter at the Greensboro Daily News in North Carolina and then joined the Charlotte Observer, beginning more than 37 years with Knight Newspapers and its successor, Knight Ridder.

He moved to the Miami Herald, where he was managing editor from 1966 to 1972 and executive editor from 1972 to 1976. The Herald of that era included the Pulitzer winners Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan, and in 1974 Time named it one of the ten best newspapers in America. Jinks hired Carl Hiaasen as a city desk reporter in 1976, chose library clerk Bea Hines in 1970 to become the paper's first Black female reporter, and on a 1963 recruiting trip to Northwestern University offered an internship to Kurt Luedtke, who went on to edit the Detroit Free Press and win an Academy Award for the screenplay of Out of Africa.

In 1977 Tony Ridder brought him to San Jose as editor of the Mercury News, a move many saw as a step down. Jinks recruited a surge of talented journalists, ended the practice of accepting gifts from sources, hired Jennie Buckner to revitalise the features sections, and helped position the paper to cover Silicon Valley. From 1981 to 1989 he was a Knight Ridder corporate news executive. In 1988, as the government weighed a joint operating agreement between the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, he declined to soften a Knight Ridder story about Attorney General Edwin Meese's real estate dealings, saying, "Do what's right." He also helped choose Janet Chusmir as the Herald's first woman executive editor in 1987.

He returned to the Mercury News as publisher in 1989 and retired in 1994, successfully urging that Jay Harris succeed him. From 1995 he served on the board of the McClatchy Company, and he was a past president of the Associated Press Managing Editors and chairman of the Knight Foundation's journalism advisory committee.

Jinks's first two marriages, to Barbara Simmons and Joan Metzner, ended in divorce. In 1971 he married Anne Claire Van Ravesteyn Pottorff, his wife of 55 years. He had two children from his second marriage, Laura Cervelli and Dan Jinks, an Academy Award winning Hollywood producer, as well as a stepson, Beau Backus.

In retirement he taught journalism ethics at the University of California, Berkeley, served as the James K. Batten Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College in North Carolina, and became a child advocate in the California court system. He lived in Los Gatos, California.

Jinks helped build two of the most respected newsrooms in the Knight Ridder chain and turned the San Jose Mercury News from a middling regional paper into a nationally regarded chronicler of Silicon Valley. At a time when newspaper leadership was dominated by white men, he advanced the careers of women and journalists of color, and the reporters, editors and novelists he hired carried his standards through American journalism for decades. Former Knight Ridder human resources chief Mary Jean Connors summed up his reputation: "He could not be bullied. He stood up for his people and his principles."