On the wall of Doug Anstaett’s office, a large map of Kansas is adorned with stars. “Those stars are the newspapers in Kansas, and the color (of the star) tells me when I visited them,” Doug said. Staying in contact with newspapers is part of the lifeblood of his position, because he is the executive director of the Kansas Press Association.
Doug has been executive director of KPA since 2004. He grew up in Lyndon, where the weekly newspaper was the People’s Herald. Doug was 12 years old in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot. As were many of us, Doug was horrified and then captivated by the news. “I became a voracious reader,” he said.
He also became a writer and served on the high school newspaper. “We had a senior English teacher that kids didn’t like much because she was really tough, but I was thankful for her when I got to college,” Doug said. He graduated from K-State in journalism and began as a reporter for Stauffer Communications, working his way up to become an editor and publisher. He worked in four states before becoming editor and publisher of the Newton Kansan in 1987.
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