Jay Ambrose, a contributing columnist at Independence Institute and former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, returned to Colorado to write nationally distributed columns and take up other pursuits last December after nine years in Washington, where he served as director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers.
In that position, he wrote editorials and other opinion pieces distributed to his corporation’s newspapers as well as to some 400 other newspaper clients of the Scripps Howard News Service. He focused on governmental policies and questions concerning the direction of American culture.
Ambrose began his journalism career almost 40 years ago, serving as the sole full-time reporter of a small daily in Winchester, Ky., and then moving on, at age 23, to be the editor of a weekly in the Appalachian country of Eastern Kentucky.
His duties there included writing most news copy and headlines, laying out pages, taking and developing photos and even folding papers on the night of delivery. A major story at the time was a conflict over building a dam in the Red River Gorge to prevent flooding. Among the project’s opponents was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who marched through the site with his young bride.
Ambrose next went to Albany, N.Y., as a reporter for The Knickerbocker News. He became head of the Capitol bureau during the Rockefeller era and was later an assistant city editor and editorial page editor at the paper.
In 1977, Ambrose joined the staff of the Rocky Mountain News as a reporter, became an editor on the city desk and then was promoted to editorial page editor. During that period, he won the national Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, as well as a statewide Sigma Delta Chi award for commentary.
He became managing editor of another Scripps Howard newspaper, the El Paso Herald-Post, in 1983, and a year later, was named editor. While there, he helped launch a national newspaper literacy campaign, heading up the first literacy committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. During the period, the paper became the first of its relatively small circulation of 30,000 to be a finalist in two different Pulitzer Prize categories in the same year. Ambrose won three statewide and one regional award for editorial writing while managing the paper.
Ambrose returned to Denver in 1988 as executive editor of the Rocky Mountain News, becoming editor a year later. He helped guide the paper through a period of intense technological change while revamping a number of its sections and overseeing redesign before leaving for Washington in 1995.
Ambrose is a graduate of Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., where he was editor of both his college newspaper and literary magazine. He was one of 12 journalists chosen nationally in 1975 for a journalist fellowship in the humanities at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School, and holds a lay diploma from the Virginia Theological Seminary. In the spring of 2004, he was the Virginius Dabney Distinguished Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
He was a member of the Inter-American Press Association, traveling to various locations in Latin America for meetings, and was on the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has been a Pulitzer judge, and is currently a member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers.
Ambrose is married to the woman he eloped with while both were students at Transylvania and has three grown sons and four grandchildren.
