Northern Nevada newspaper editor, columnist Anne Pershing dies

Longtime newspaper editor and columnist Anne Pershing, known for championing social causes in the Northern Nevada communities she covered, has died. She was 71.

Tim Pershing said his mother was found at home in Reno on Thursday and likely died of heart disease.

Anne Pershing was drawn to journalism because she wanted to help all people in the community, a principle that allowed her to stand firm when she took positions that were unpopular or ahead of the times in a small town, he son said.

She supported equal treatment of all, whether women, gays or seniors. Tim Pershing recalled in particular the community uproar over a gay rodeo that wanted to host an event in Fallon in the late 1980s.

“She just had a very strong sense of right and wrong,” he said. “Sometimes people would try to intimidate her into changing stories or backing off and she wouldn’t do it. I think she just learned she was ready to deal with the consequences and she wasn’t going to back down.”

Anne Pershing was inducted into the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008 following an accomplished career with two rural Nevada weeklies.

She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1983 at age 38. She started working as a general assignment reporter at the Lahontan Valley News and rose through the ranks to become editor and executive vice president.

She left that newspaper in 2003 to launch the competing but now defunct Fallon Star Press, said Barry Smith, executive director of the Nevada Press Association who had known Pershing for two decades. Up until her sudden death, she was still writing her weekly “Grandma With Attitude” column in the Reno Gazette-Journal.

“She was one of those people that knew everybody in the state,” Smith said. “She genuinely cared about people.”

Pershing is also survived by a daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, brother and sister. Services have not been scheduled, but a celebration of her life is being planned.