Spartan Profiles: Carole Leigh Hutton
FREE PRESS TOP EDITOR
After 171 years, the Detroit Free Press, the city’s largest daily newspaper with a circulation of 365,000, has named a woman to its top editorial post. Carole Leigh Hutton, ’78, as the new executive editor, will help set the paper’s vision and direction. She takes over at a competitive time when, in her words, “newspapers (are facing) their toughest competition not from other news media but from all the other many ways people can spend their time, and that makes it all the more crucial for the newspaper to be relevant, useful, informative and entertaining all at the same time.”
A native of Framingham, MA, Hutton became interested in journalism when, as a teenage fan of the Boston Bruins, she corresponded with a hockey writer for the Boston Record-American. Carole chose MSU, sight unseen, after a computer search for her ideal journalism program along with hands-on reporting opportunities. “I wouldn't trade my college time for anything—and that includes the considerable time spent at the State News as well as my other campus experiences,” she says. “I hated to leave.”
She singles out professor Jim Scotten with giving her direction. At MSU she found out that “responsibility and demands of a daily newspaper are relentless, and that becomes clear quickly at the State News.”
After MSU she returned to suburban Boston to become editor of a start-up weekly, the Natick Sun. She also worked at the Times in Hammond, IN, and the Detroit News before joining the Free Press in August 1990 and rising to managing editor in 1996.
Would she recommend aspiring journalists to MSU? Says Carole, “I would absolutely recommend MSU, and I'd urge students to spend some time on the State News while there. But I also regularly advise students to take as many non-journalism courses as time allows, because journalists have to be very good generalists and sometimes even experts in all kinds of things beyond our own craft.”
