Kay Fanning loved journalism. She served as editor and publisher of the Anchorage Daily News, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and first woman president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Kay came to Alaska in 1965. She worked at the Anchorage Daily News, where she met and married Larry Fanning. Together they purchased the paper, which he edited until his death from a heart attack at his desk in 1971. She then managed and edited the paper and transformed it into a hard-hitting, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative paper and increased its circulation from 12,000 to 50,000–overtaking the circulation numbers of the larger Anchorage Times. In 1983, she moved to Boston and became the first woman to edit a national newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor. She broke through journalism’s prejudices against women and modeled success for the next generation of female reporters, editors and business managers.