Christy Bulkeley; helped open newspapers to female leaders
WASHINGTON - Christy C. Bulkeley, one of the few female newspaper publishers in the United States in the 1970s and a key researcher on women in journalism, died of ovarian cancer Sept. 13 at the University of North Carolina Women’s Hospital in Raleigh. She was 67.
Ms. Bulkeley, a vice president at the Gannett Foundation in Washington from 1985 to 1992, was the first woman named a chief executive of a Gannett-owned newspaper. After leaving Gannett, she received a master’s degree in theological studies from Washington’s Wesley Theological Seminary in 1994.
“Christy’s long list of firsts in journalism and community advocacy were achieved because of her intelligence, her savvy, and her gumption,’’ said Sheila Gibbons, editor of the Media Report to Women newsletter. “Her success as a pioneering female executive at one of the nation’s largest media companies nurtured the career aspirations of many other women.’’
She was born in Galesburg, Ill., and graduated from the University of Missouri. She spent her career in Gannett newspapers, working in New York at the Rochester Times-Union and the Saratoga Springs Saratogian, where she became editor, publisher, and president. Gannett executive Al Neuharth promoted her, at age 34, to chief executive of the Danville (Ill.) Commercial-News in 1976, and she simultaneously was vice president of the newspaper chain’s central US newspapers.
“She was an outstanding journalist and executive, and she had a remarkable ability to work with males and females,’’ Neuharth, the founder of USA Today and the Freedom Forum, said last week in an interview. “At that time, we at Gannett had only white males as publishers, and she presented the first opportunity to change that pattern.’’
Gannett later became known for promoting women and minorities, “but if she had not done as well as she did, [the old] pattern might have continued,’’ he said.
In the spring of 2002, Ms. Bulkeley published a research study in Nieman Reports that updated benchmark studies of women working in the mainstream media.
Ms. Bulkeley was a Pulitzer Prize nominating judge and a 1978 winner of the national Headliner Award from what is now the Association for Women in Communications.
Her husband of 33 years, David Finks, died in June. She leaves two brothers.