Jim Lackey, longtime editor at Catholic News Service, holds up a Washington Nationals baseball jersey during his retirement party Feb. 13 in Washington. Looking on at left is his daughter, Katharine. (CNS photo/Bob Roller)
By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service
FALLS CHURCH, Va. — Jim Lackey, recently retired longtime editor at Catholic News Service, would be hard-pressed to choose between old and new media.
As Web editor and manager for CNS for the past decade, Lackey certainly got the importance of new media — and its broad outreach on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube — but he also saw, and still sees, the importance of old-fashioned print publications and doesn’t think they are going away anytime soon.
Sitting at his kitchen table in the Washington suburb of Falls Church Feb. 15 — just two days after his CNS retirement party — Lackey said he is a “firm believer” in every Catholic family receiving a diocesan or archdiocesan newspaper “even if it just sits on the coffee table.”
As he sees it, a paper just sitting there has the chance to be picked up and read.
He says this from experience, remembering The Catholic Telegraph, archdiocesan newspaper of Cincinnati, at his home with his parents and two siblings in Dayton, Ohio.
He admits he mostly read the movie reviews in his younger years and was often perplexed about ratings from then-NC News: “Adults With Reservations” wondering how adults could hold spots for movies.
Then years later, after graduating with a journalism degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1974, he ended up working for a diocesan newspaper: The Catholic Messenger in Davenport, Iowa. Lackey’s official title was diocesan editor, but during his five years there, he did reporting, photography and layout, noting that one benefit of niche journalism is: “You get to do a little bit of everything.”
In Davenport, he also met his future wife, Linda, who was working for the daily newspaper.
Lackey sensed he might have a career in journalism after getting good grades for writing in elementary school and being the editor of his Catholic high school newspaper. He considered sports journalism and could probably have written about his beloved Washington Nationals baseball team, but he stuck with the Catholic press until his last day of work at the end of last December.
He started with CNS, then called NC News, in 1979, and a year later married Linda, currently a freelance writer and editor. Their daughter, Katharine, was born in 1986. For the past seven years, she has worked at USA Today, most recently as an assistant editor of breaking news.
At CNS, Lackey wore several hats. From 1979 to 1984, he was a federal reporter covering the White House, Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court. He saw two U.S. presidents up close in the Oval Office: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
But politics aside, he said one of his favorite assignments was standing in Washington’s Lafayette Park in 1979, watching St. John Paul II come down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
Five years after that first of several U.S. papal trips, Lackey was named national news editor and then in 1989 he became general news editor, supervising the daily news report and coordinating national and international coverage.
In 2014, he won the St. Francis de Sales Award, the highest honor given by the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada.
