Nancy Maynard, the first African-American woman to own a major daily
newspaper in America, died Sunday in Los Angeles after a long illness. She
was 61. She started her career in journalism in 1966, spurned by the
inaccurate reporting she read about her neighborhood. Maynard, who landed
her first job at The New York Post when she was 20 years old, went on to
work at the New York Times as its youngest staff writer/reporter. In 1975,
she married fellow journalist Robert C. Maynard and together they formed the
prominent, nonprofit Maynard Institute, a facility devoted to training
minority reporters and encouraging newsrooms to diversify.