Lee and Pearson among celebrated Mobile reporters

Since 1950, the Green Eyeshade Awards have recognized the very best journalism in the Southeastern United States. Two veterans returned from World War II, Ed Lee and Ted Pearson, proved to be two of the Mobile Press Register's most celebrated reporters who won the awards.

Both men came from the small community of Crichton, then on the western outskirts of Mobile at the bottom of Spring Hill. Lee was two years older than Pearson, having been born in 1924.

Both attended Murphy High School and both joined the Press Register as office clerks after graduation. With the onset of World War II, Lee entered the U.S. Army in December 1942 and Pearson joined the U.S. Navy in May 1944. After the war, both men rejoined the staff of the newspaper.

In November and December 1958, Lee and Pearson collaborated on a series of 40 stories that pointed out mismanagement and political influence in the operation of the Alabama State Docks during the latter part of the administration of Governor James E. Folsom.

The articles won for the two men the Green Eyeshade Award of the Atlanta Chapter of Sigma Delta Chi in 1959.

Directory illustrates the dramatic decline in the newspaper's staff over the last 25 years

In 1991, the Mobile Press Register phone directory listed more than 60 editors, reporters, photographers, and other staffers connected with news gathering.

In 2016, about a dozen people in Mobile carry on news operations. 

The Press Register is now fully integrated with other Newhouse-owned newspapers in Alabama and Louisiana: the Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. What that means is that the newspapers are edited and designed at central locations. Support functions such as human resources for the newspapers have also been combined, reduced, and centralized.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that employment in the newspaper industry overall has declined by 60 percent over the past 25 years, from 458,000 in 1990 to 183,000 in March 2016.

The Newhouse newspapers, which are leading the charge into the digital age, seem to have reduced jobs much deeper than other papers in the nation.