NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Kent Flanagan, a longtime journalist and open government advocate who spent 21 years as Tennessee’s bureau chief for The Associated Press, died Wednesday. He was 69.
Flanagan’s wife, Janet, said he died at home after a long illness. He had been talking and joking with his brother just before he died, she said.
Flanagan worked nearly 40 years as a journalist, starting with newspapers in Texas and Florida before joining the AP in Pennsylvania in 1979 as a newsman.
“I’ve been a journalist since the age of 12,” Flanagan told the Williamson Herald in Franklin., Tennessee, in April 2012. “I got drafted in middle school to write sports for the student newspaper, and kept going.”
Like many of his AP colleagues at the time, the news cooperative moved him around the nation, first to South Carolina as news editor and then to North Dakota as administrative correspondent. In 1983, he was named bureau chief in Nashville, where he oversaw news and sales until he retired in 2004.