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About Rosemary Goudreau O’Hara

Rosemary Goudreau O’Hara retired three years ago as editorial page editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, a position she’d held since 2012. Previously, she was the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune. Influence Magazine twice named her one of the most influential people in Florida politics. She was a key member of the Sun Sentinel team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She is a member of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications’ Hall of Fame. And on the occasion of her retirement, the Broward County Commission named March 9, 2021, as “Rosemary O’Hara Appreciation Day in Broward County” — something that just doesn’t happen to journalists. After 44 years, she was ready to retire. “I leave the game knowing I left it all on the field,” she said at the time. A native of Upper Michigan, Rosemary grew up in Tampa and is a 1976 graduate of the University of Florida. She started her career at the Tampa Tribune during the era of Woodward and Bernstein, working alongside a reporter who would critique her phone interviews and make her call people back if she failed to ask all the right questions. With that reporter, she co-wrote an investigative series on political patronage and corruption at Hillsborough Community College that led to seven administrators losing their jobs. Another project on medical malpractice led to her becoming the paper’s medical writer, a position she would later hold at the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald. As a medical reporter, Rosemary helped tell the stories of Barney Clark’s artificial heart, Baby Fae’s baboon heart and the first child in Florida to receive a heart transplant. She also had a front-row seat to the AIDS epidemic, and came to well know many of the victims, the scientists, the activists and the people who believed you could catch the disease from a mosquito bite. A good source in the state health department used to leave this message with the newsroom’s clerk: “Tell Rosemary to call Strep Throat.” In 1990, after a year-long fellowship at Stanford University and 14 years as an award-winning reporter, Rosemary became an assistant city editor in the Miami Herald’s Broward Bureau. It was an era whose headlines included Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband’s penis, William Kennedy Smith facing rape charges in Palm Beach, and Kathy Willets running a prostitution ring from her Tamarac bedroom as her sheriffs-deputy husband hid in the closet, peeking. Two years later, as Bill Clinton began his run for president, Rosemary joined the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau as an editor. It was an era when newspapers were trying to cover elections as job interviews, not horse races. Rosemary remembers trying to squeeze Gennifer Flowers onto the “issues grid.” From Washington, Rosemary made editing stops in Norfolk, St. Louis and Cincinnati, where she was the managing editor of a 205-person newsroom and twice named a Gannett “Supervisor of the Year.” In 2001, after rioting rocked Cincinnati following the police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Rosemary created a newspaper-citizen initiative called Neighbor to Neighbor designed to get people talking about — and maybe doing something about — racial tensions in the region. The effort led to 145 facilitator-led conversations convened in living rooms, school cafeterias and church basements. It spurred pulpit swaps, potluck exchanges, police ride-alongs and people running for office. It made a real difference in some people’s lives. For her efforts, Rosemary received a prestigious community-leadership award. To her, the effort proved the power of a newspaper to connect and empower citizens to make a difference in their community. Sadly, that power is greatly diminished today. In 2002, Rosemary returned home as editorial page editor of the Tampa Tribune, where she reinvigorated the opinion pages and significantly increased readership. But six years later, during the Great Recession, she got laid off. Over the next couple of years, she served as the press secretary on the gubernatorial campaign of Republican Sen. Paula Dockery, taught opinion writing at the University of Florida and launched a website called Florida Voices that syndicated opinion content to 34 newspaper customers. Rosemary’s journey of reinvention kept her in the game and eventually led her back to newspapers. When the opportunity to lead the Sun Sentinel’s opinion team opened in 2012, she jumped. There, she elevated the newspaper’s voice by presenting a daily collection of fair and informed commentary. She also was a regular guest on television and radio shows. She is particularly proud of the team she assembled; the weekly South Florida 100 feature she created; the informative endorsements her team offered during elections; the op-eds she solicited from disparate voices; and the forceful editorials she and her team wrote on local, state, and national issues. Rosemary is also proud of the Invading Sea collaborative she spearheaded with her counterparts at the Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald, which grew to include almost every editorial board in the state. It was an unprecedented collaboration meant to raise awareness about the threat facing Florida from sea-level rise and climate change. Never before had opinion pages of competing newspapers shared and published the same editorial on the same day. The effort had an impact. As one example, it inspired a similar collaborative among South Florida business groups, whose voices are more embraced in Tallahassee. Rosemary has served on a number of state and national boards, including the First Amendment Foundation, the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, the Associated Press Managing Editors and the Association of Opinion Journalists. Rosemary currently lives in Dunedin with her husband, Tom O’Hara, a distinguished newspaper editor who in his retirement, served as editor of the Invading Sea collaborative. In 2023, the couple handed the effort off to Florida Atlantic University, proud to know the university wanted to keep it alive. Tom, a golfer, is now focused on his short game. In retirement, Rosemary continues to make a difference. She serves as vice president of the Dunedin Newcomers Club and as membership chair of the Dunedin Boat Club, even though the couple doesn’t have a boat. This year, the City Commission also appointed her to its Public Relations Advisory Action Committee, where she now serves as secretary. But she very much enjoys retirement. She takes classes in tai chi, line-dancing and Zumba Gold. She belongs to three book clubs. She loves traveling and taking long walks on the beach. She believes in living life while you’ve got it.

Source: ACLU of Florida on 07/29/2024