J. Damon Cain, an Iowa farm boy who by happy chance became an award-winning journalist, is retiring as editor of the Beckley, West Virginia, Register-Herald after 45 years in the newspaper business.
“I was given the gift of longevity,” said Cain. “And a career I have loved from day one.”
Cain, 70, has served as the newspaper’s editor for 10 years, coming to southern West Virginia from the Denver Post, where he helped direct Pulitzer Prize-winning photography in 2010 and 2012 as the managing editor for presentation and design.
His last day is March 31.
The Register-Herald has grown into a leading West Virginia daily during Cain’s tenure. It has consistently won awards for news reporting, photography, design, column and editorial writing, claiming first place in general excellence by winning the annual West Virginia Press Association contest for large circulation newspapers two of the last three years.
The paper’s quarterly magazine, West Virginia South, has also won many honors for strong visual appeal and its engaging stories on life and people in one of America’s most scenic regions.
“We are in debt to Damon for his leadership, inspiration and commitment to journalism in the public interest,” said Bill Ketter, senior vice president of news for CNHI, LLC, the Register-Herald’s parent company. “He has made it a better paper by motivating the staff to do those things they are really good at: smart, accurate and ambitious journalism.”
Raised on a farm outside Bagley, Iowa, and an English major graduate of the University of Iowa, Cain first envisioned a career in teaching, which he did for three years at the high school level.
Then serendipity struck. He enrolled in a summer writing program at his college alma mater to polish his teaching skills, discovering instead his love of writing and telling stories.
That led to his first journalism assignments at three Iowa community papers: The Charles City Press, The Vinton Cedar Valley Times and the Ottumwa Courier. In Vinton, Cain got his feet wet in watchdog journalism off a barroom tip that the local utility board was secretly hording money from elevated water rates in order to build a new wastewater plant. His stories exposed the scheme and lowered the water rates.
“That was my ‘welcome to journalism’ moment, even though it was at a small, five-day-a-week newspaper out in the middle of corn fields in the rural recesses of eastern Iowa,” Cain wrote in his recent column recalling his newspaper career.
Cain later worked for the Decatur, Illinois, Herald & Review before moving on to an acclaimed North Carolina regional paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, as director of news design. He oversaw the design of the paper’s 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of stories on lagoon and groundwater pollution caused by the state’s hog industry. Three years later, the Society of News Design voted the News & Observer the best designed paper in the country.
Cain will continue to write an occasional column for The Register-Herald, travel to visit his children,enjoy his passion for baseball and “good cold beer” with visits to parks he has come to know and some he hasn’t.
Damon and his wife, Sheila, will continue to reside in Beckley. They are the parents of four adult children.