Gerry Lanosga
Gerry Lanosga has been a part of the Indiana media industry since 1988. He spent eight years with the Indianapolis News and Indianapolis Star, nine years at WTHR-TV, and has been teching at Indiana University for more than a decade. Throughout his journalism career, he consistently created stories that provoked change and left an impact on his audience.
Early Journalism Career
Lanosga turned four years old the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He recalls watching the mission launch with his family and understanding that there was a big event happening on television. It was July 20, 1969, and Lanosga had just experienced his first encounter with broadcast journalism.
As Lanosga grew older, he developed a love for writing. He attended Mitchell High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and was enrolled in various writing courses. He started his journalism career there, first as copy editor and later as editor-in-chief of his high school paper, The Echelon. Then, at the University of Redlands, he worked his way up to become editor-in-chief for the student-run newspaper.
The small, private college in California had less than 2,000 students, so The Bulldog Weekly did not have a large circulation. Lanosga says it was a small paper focused on small things, but they made a lot of big splashes.
One notable occasion was a controversy over a full-page Bud Light advertisement featured on the back page of the paper. The newspaper solicited the ad because it needed funding, but it angered the university's board of trustees, which chastised the staff at a subsequent meeting and mandated that any further such advertising be accompanied by a disclaimer about the legal age for consuming alcohol.
Because the University of Redlands did not have a journalism major, Lanosga graduated with a political science degree and a minor in professional writing.
Clips in this video
Print Career
After college, Lanosga sent his resume all over the west coast in hopes of finding a job close to home. When he didn’t get any offers, he decided to follow his future wife, Michelle, to Indianapolis where she would be starting law school. With $500 and all his possessions packed into his car, Lanosga headed to Indiana for the first time ever. A few weeks after the big move, Lanosga landed a job at The Daily Journal in Johnson County.
The Daily Journal was a small local paper with only four reporters. For 11 months, he covered the county government, the police records and court vitals. Lanosga found value in working for a small newspaper because he got to learn how to do journalism. Since he was not a journalism major in college, he says he learned many of his journalism skills on the job.
Clips in this video
At the small paper, he was able to try various types of writing and cover different beats. He gained experience covering crime, writing feature stories and trying investigative reporting in a short amount of time.
About a year after his move to Indiana, Lanosga transitioned to a new job at the Indianapolis News. He worked at the News (and also the Indianapolis Star when the two papers merged) for eight years, one of his roles including a weekly columnist.
One of the most memorable pieces Lanosga wrote at the News was a piece about the Crown Hill Cemetery. It was a Memorial Day column about shelves of unclaimed cremated remains in a maintenance shed at the cemetery.
Clips in this video
A few days after the column was published, a reader called Lanosga and told him she thought one of those unclaimed jars might be her baby. The baby had been born out of wedlock and died shortly after birth. The baby’s cremated ashes were taken away and the family never spoke about the baby again.
Lanosga’s column allowed the woman to reconnect with her child and give her baby a proper goodbye. He said being able to have such a profound impact on a reader was one of the highlights of his career.
Broadcast Career
Near the end of his time at the Indianapolis News, Lanosga and his co-worker, Kathleen Johnston, heard that there were openings at WTHR-TV. Lanosga and Johnston felt ready to try something new, and in 1997, they joined the station's investigative team.
As an investigative producer, Lanosga’s workload shifted to long-term projects. WTHR used the engaging investigative pieces to encourage more viewers to watch the station. Lanosga said this was beneficial for the investigative team because they had more time to create really important pieces.
An investigative piece that stands out to Lanosga is one centered around Ruth Lilly. Lilly was an elderly and reclusive heiress of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune who lived in Indianapolis. Journalists knew her as a regular donor to nonprofit organizations and politicians, but the investigative team received a tip that she was being exploited. When they looked into the claim, they discovered Lilly had been under a court-ordered conservatorship for decades and that her attorney, bankers and medical staff had been involved in millions of dollars in questionable spending on lavish overseas trips, among other things.
After a year of interviews, looking into public records, and undercover work, WTHR-TV broadcast a series that prompted a Marion County judge to order major cuts in fees to the bank and attorney and strict new guidelines for Lilly's conservatorship.
Clips in this video
Professor of Journalism
After nearly a decade in broadcast journalism, Lanosga felt that he was ready for a change. In 2010, he earned his Ph.D in mass communications at Indiana University and taught journalism for three years at Ball State University as an assistant professor. In 2012, he returned to Indiana University to teach as a journalism professor.
At Indiana University, he teaches future journalists the ethics behind the media industry. He also teaches investigative journalism and other courses.
Lanosga enjoys teaching History of Journalism, a course focused on the timeline of American journalism. The curriculum emphasizes the importance of oral histories which Lanosga deems as extremely valuable. He says that oral histories collect a perspective of journalism that cannot be told through artifacts.
Lanosga is a professor because he wants to prepare the next generation of journalists. He says despite it being a challenge to teach journalism courses while the business is dealing with hostility from the public, artificial intelligence, and economic contraction, it does keep the job interesting.
Clips in this video
Lanosga has a national reputation for his research in journalism history, especially the in the area of investigative journalism and journalism's professional prize culture.
In May 2023, Lanosga won the Covert Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's history division. He earned this award for an article that explored investigative journalism's roots in the early nineteenth century, when abolitionists pioneered a documentary approach to expose the abuses of slavery.
Lanosga currently serves as the Director of Journalism for the Media School.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
By Marnie Sara
Edited by Jack Lindner
For more information on the life and career of Gerry Lanosga, watch his entire oral history interview.
Last Edit: May 2024
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