Editor’s Note: The Legacy Foundation’s Press Forward program is currently providing a grant for an internship position at the Post-Tribune.
Eric Deggans’ journalism roots run deep in Northwest Indiana. He wrote for the school newspaper and yearbook at Andrean High School, and his father, Chuck Deggans, was a former Post-Tribune and Gary Crusader columnist.
Now, through a Legacy Foundation event, the Gary native turned NPR critic-at-large and professor is returning to the community to advocate for local journalism.
“It just made sense to kind of come full circle and then come back to Northwest Indiana to talk about journalism and talk about what I learned,” Deggans said. “This is the place where I had some of my earliest journalism experiences, so to come back and then maybe encourage establishments and institutions so that other people can have those experiences too, just makes a lot of sense.”
Deggans is the keynote speaker for the Legacy Foundation’s May 28 launch of Press Forward Lake County, a branch of the national movement to strengthen local news. According to a Legacy Foundation news release, the initiative plans to invest in the local news ecosystem and support media organizations and expand residents’ access to reliable information.
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The Press Forward Lake County event will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. May 28 at the Indiana University Northwest Savannah Center.
Kelly Anoe, the Legacy Foundation’s president and CEO, said it was important for Lake County to join the national movement as local news changes nationwide.
“When people have access to trusted information, they can become more connected, engaged and empowered to be part of their community,” Anoe said. “I think that’s why it really resonated with us at the Legacy Foundation. We’ve really been invested in building local community leadership and resident engagement.”
Anoe said the Legacy Foundation wanted Deggans to speak because he’s nationally respected and from Gary.
“He understands both the power of the media and the importance of telling local stories,” Anoe said.
Deggans graduated with degrees in journalism and political science from Indiana University, and in 2024, he was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. According to his website, in 2025, he assumed the role of critic-at-large for NPR, and he’s a Knight professor of journalism and media ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Anoe said the Legacy Foundation has a relationship with the Knight Foundation — a nonprofit that supports arts, journalism, research and community development — and they knew Deggans is a Knight fellow.
“He was our number one choice,” Anoe said, adding that the Knight Foundation helped bridge the connection between the Legacy Foundation and Deggans.
The Knight Foundation supports Press Forward organizations nationwide, Deggans said. He hopes that his talk will help boost local news coverage in Northwest Indiana and Gary.
This is Deggans’ first talk for Press Forward, he said, but he’s spoken publicly about media issues. In 2012, he published “Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation,” a book that examines how prejudice, racism and sexism fuel some elements of modern media, according to his website.
Growing up, Deggans saw the impact that his father’s work had on the community. According to Post-Tribune archives, Chuck Deggans died after a stroke in 2015 and was widely known for his social and entertainment column in the Gary Crusader, “Chuck Deggans’ Den.”
For the Post-Tribune, his father covered community events in area social clubs, Deggans said.
“He was keeping the community informed about how people were entertaining themselves in the Black community in Gary,” Deggans said. “Wherever we went in the city, people would stop and talk with him, and I carried that forward in my career.”
In 2023, Deggans wrote a feature story for Indie Wire about Avery Books, an actor in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” Books, who’s also a Gary native, generally didn’t talk with reporters, Deggans said.
“But when he found out who my father was, he opened the door to his trailer and invited me in and spent time with me,” Deggans said. “Because he had grown up reading my dad’s columns. … In some ways, journalism is like a message in a bottle, where you put this stuff out there, and you have no idea who’s going to read it, how it can affect them or how far it can go.”
Seeing his father’s success in the journalism industry also encouraged Deggans to choose it as a career.
“It’s hard to pin down how inspirational he was because so many of those things were just there,” Deggans said. “They were always present in my life as I was growing up.”
Deggans is excited to share stories from highlights of his career, but his main goal in his May 28 talk is to get people excited about local journalism. He believes communities struggle when they lose reliable and accurate access to information about local institutions, including schools, businesses and government.
In Northwest Indiana, he believes that can be especially harmful.
“We’re always consuming media platforms that are more focused on Chicago and northeastern Illinois,” Deggans said. “Our own local character, our local concerns or local issues, they’re not as much a part of that media mix, and we get used to devaluing it all. … Journalism can help bring struggles to light, show people how they can help and allow them to keep an eye on how their resources are being used.”
Anoe has seen Deggans speak in videos, so she’s excited to see his speech in-person at the Press Forward Lake County event.
“He’s such a smart and dynamic speaker,” Anoe said. “I’m excited to hear the connection that he’ll make between the national lens and local lens of the need to support local news and journalism. … I think it’s something that communities sometimes take for granted until it’s gone.”
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