Three journalists with RJ ties headed to Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame

Charles Zobell was a beloved editor who worked to make the Review-Journal’s staff more diverse and died days before his accomplishments would be honored.

Mary Hausch was a trailblazer who covered the racial integration of Las Vegas schools, sued the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s former parent company for what she saw as sex discrimination and mentored a generation of aspiring journalists.

Bill Hughes was a skilled photographer remembered by a colleague as a “magician with light” who treated each of his subjects like they were the most important person in the world.

The careers of Zobell, Hausch and Hughes took different paths, but they intersected in two significant ways: All three journalists spent years working for the Review-Journal, and all three will be inducted into the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame.

Their achievements will be recognized at a ceremony in Reno on Saturday, along with those of six other journalists: Jake Highton, Frank McCulloch, Steve Ranson, Guy Luis Rocha, Laura Tennant and Guy Clifton. The Nevada Press Foundation’s board added Clifton to the class after its initial announcement and his recent death.

Charles Zobell

Zobell’s daughter, Rebecca, described her father as a “stubborn man who doesn’t like taking credit for things.”

But he was looking forward to being inducted into the Hall of Fame, she said.

Zobell described the award as an honor in an interview the day before his death at age 74.

He started his career at the newspaper in 1975 as a general assignment reporter after he graduated from Brigham Young University in Utah.

Hausch sent Zobell and another reporter to cover the 1977 legislative session. He said that reporting experience was probably his favorite.

Zobell left the newspaper in 1978 to work as director of intergovernmental relations for the city of Las Vegas but returned in 1980 to be city editor at the invitation of Hausch. He eventually became managing editor, filling that role for two decades before his position was eliminated in 2012.

As an editor, Zobell worked to strengthen the Review-Journal’s ties to the community.

He tried to hire women and minorities because he wanted the newsroom to reflect the community. Doing so built credibility for the paper, he said.

One of those reporters was Marcia Pledger, whom Zobell hired straight out of college in 1987.

It was “not fun” to be a Black reporter at the Review-Journal back then, she said.

But Zobell was supportive. She said that when an editor made a racist joke, she complained to him, and he told the editor and Pledger that there would be no tolerance for racism at the paper.

Zobell and Hausch, who said she wrote the paper’s first ethics policy, also fought ethical battles together, Hausch said.

According to Zobell, the city had no media ethics when he started at the Review-Journal.

At Christmastime, he said, gifts were delivered to the newsroom every day: “fruit baskets, wagons full of booze, expensive liquor. One day all of the sports staff showed up with leather jackets that had the Caesars Palace logo embroidered on the back.”

Zobell said he drafted a letter that the editor sent to hotel publicity departments saying the newspaper would no longer accept gifts.

After he left the Review-Journal, he was director of digital media at KSNV-TV, Channel 3. He also taught news reporting and writing courses at UNLV for over 20 years.

Zobell tried to steer his talented students toward print journalism.

“I made the decision when I was in school to follow a print journalism track instead of broadcasting,” he said. “Now there was an obvious reason: My voice is horrible on the air. But that wasn’t the reason. The main reason was you could see, even as a student, that print journalists were serious journalists.”

Mary Hausch

In 1971, Hausch, now 75, had only been at the Review-Journal for a couple of weeks when she learned that the position she had been hired to fill — that of consumer affairs reporter — was being eliminated.

She would be the education reporter, her editor told her.

It ended up being a lucky change, she said, because she got to cover the start of court-ordered integration, which meant front-page stories.

Black children were bused out of the Historic Westside, except for those in kindergarten and sixth grade, she said, and white children got bused to the Westside for sixth grade.

The Review-Journal was a different place back then.

Hausch said the city editor thought the Westside was dangerous and assigned a male reporter to accompany her when she reported in the field. She would send her colleague to the Shamrock, the bar where reporters drank.

After four years, Hausch became assistant city editor, then city editor, then managing editor.

“A good editor is a good teacher and helps people become their ultimate selves,” she said. “And I always wanted people to dream large.”

At the Review-Journal, she said she would ask: “If you could do anything here, what do you want to do?”

When a sports editor said he wanted to be a business editor, for instance, she made him the business editor, a position the paper didn’t have at the time.

But for Hausch, the managing editor position was a “glass ceiling,” she said. When the editor position became open, Hausch applied, but didn’t get it. Instead, she was made associate editor.

She complained to the Nevada Equal Rights Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then was fired in 1991.

After her termination, she filed a lawsuit, claiming “she was subjected to sex discrimination when denied promotion to the position of Editor,” according to an order in the case on legal website Justia.

Hausch and Donrey Media Group, the company that owned the Review-Journal at the time, eventually settled.

After leaving the newspaper, Hausch became a professor at UNLV, teaching there for 25 years. She made her “bigger impact” training reporters, she said.

She mostly taught advanced reporting and ethics. She especially loved her ethics classes.

“I think people need to be mindful of ethics all the time,” she said. “And my motto was maximize truth-telling and minimize harm.”

Bill Hughes

Hughes was an old-school photographer.

He was a lifelong smoker and had a gruff voice, said Review-Journal photographer Kevin Cannon. He wore an old-fashioned photographer’s vest with pockets made for rolls of film. He preferred Nikon cameras, which were used by most 1970s newspaper photographers.

“He was a magician with light and made every subject the most important person in the world,” Cannon said in Hughes’ obituary.

Hughes, who died in 2021 at age 65, started his career in Las Vegas in 1992, according to his obituary. He worked at the Las Vegas New Times, which was renamed Las Vegas CityLife. CityLife was purchased by the Review-Journal’s parent company in March 2005.

Hughes eventually became an almost full-time freelancer.

He was skilled at portrait photography and covering entertainment, Cannon said. And he preferred being a freelancer because of the freedom that role gave him.

“Through all his work — from striking portraits to surreal images of nightclub bacchanalia to stark, eyewitness photojournalism — he helped tell the grand story of modern Las Vegas,” former CityLife Editor Andrew Kiraly said in a testimonial for Hughes’ Hall of Fame nomination.

It could be said that Hausch and Zobell also helped tell the grand story of modern Las Vegas.

“Please don’t give up on journalism,” Zobell wrote in his Sept. 7, 2012, farewell email to the Review-Journal staff. “The future shines brightly as the print media find new ways to meet their communities’ information needs. As you continue in your careers, keep focused on the ethical precepts of the Society of Professional Journalists – seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently and be accountable.”

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.