Bruce Sagan, Publisher Who Revitalized Community News and Helped Save and Bring the Joffrey Ballet to Chicago, Dies at 96

Bruce Sagan
Bruce Sagan

Bruce Sagan, Publisher Who Revitalized Community News and Helped Save and Bring the Joffrey Ballet to Chicago, Dies at 96

Chicago, September 21, 2025 – Bruce Sagan, the Chicago newspaperman who turned a failing neighborhood weekly into a platform for investigative reporting, built one of the largest community newspaper groups in the country, and later played a central role in transforming Chicago into a major center for dance and theater, died today at his home in Chicago after a brief battle with cancer. He was 96.

Over more than seven decades, Mr. Sagan was an indefatigable force in Chicago journalism and civic life. As the owner and publisher of the Hyde Park Herald — which he bought in 1953 at age 24 — he gave voice to a South Side neighborhood confronting racial change, housing discrimination and urban renewal. He published exposés on negligent landlords and controversial city planning decisions, coverage that helped Hyde Park qualify for one of the nation’s first federally funded urban renewal projects.

When he sold his Economist Newspaper Group 35 years later, it had grown to nearly 30 papers with 1,000 employees and a circulation exceeding 400,000. “If there is anything unusual, it is not the reporting itself but its appearance in a community newspaper,” Mr. Sagan wrote when the Southtown Economist was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “The community newspaper must deal with the areas of conflict within its neighborhood if that neighborhood is to be able to deal with the problem successfully.”

The Herald’s coverage spanned decades of local and national history — from civil rights struggles to Barack Obama’s first political steps. As a young state senator, Mr. Obama wrote regular “Springfield Report” columns for the Herald and, in 2002, the paper was the first to publish his now-famous speech opposing the Second Iraq War.

Mr. Sagan was unusually forward-looking about the future of media. He embraced offset printing and four-color presses early on, and experimented with computer typesetting. As early as the 1950s he proposed to The New York Times Co. the idea of a national edition — which the paper initially rejected. When the Times finally launched that edition in the 1980s, Mr. Sagan’s Chicago plant was the first site chosen to print and distribute it, receiving typeset pages via satellite. Even in his later years, he experimented with putting the Hyde Park Herald online and eventually converted it into a not-for-profit before retiring in 2022, hoping to preserve local journalism amid a collapsing business model.

Mr. Sagan’s civic leadership reshaped Chicago’s neighborhoods. He chaired the Illinois Housing Development Authority, which built thousands of moderate-income housing units during a time of federal retrenchment, pioneered mixed-income projects, and helped draft early federal Section 8 housing legislation. He co-founded the Hyde Park Federal Savings and Loan to fight redlining and chaired the campaign to keep St. Bernard Hospital in the Englewood neighborhood.

Bruce Sagan was born Feb. 1, 1929, in Summit, N.J., to George and Esther Sagan, Jewish immigrants from what is now western Ukraine. His cousin was the astronomer Carl Sagan. After a term at the University of Wisconsin, he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he wrote for the student paper and briefly attended the law school before deciding to pursue journalism full time.

To support himself in the early years of his career, Mr. Sagan drove a yellow cab and worked a late shift on a V8 Juice assembly line in a Campbell’s Soup factory. He worked as a copy boy at Hearst’s International News Service, then as a reporter for the City News Bureau, where he covered crime, courts, and City Hall. Everyone from Chicago politicians to local business leaders knew him for his everpresent trademark bow ties, and some knew he kept a trenchcoat in a hall closet of the apartment building where he lived on the South Side because it reeked from the smell of smoke from the many fires he covered as a cub reporter.

Mr. Sagan’s love of the arts dated back to his nights as a young copy boy when he also worked as an usher at Chicago’s Civic Opera House so he could watch dance performances. In the 1960s, he and his then-wife, Judith Sagan, purchased the Harper Theater, converted it into a performance space, and launched the Harper Dance Festival, which brought Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, and the Joffrey Ballet, among other modern dancers, to Chicago audiences. After the Joffrey faced collapse during the financial crisis of 1990s, Mr. Sagan and his second wife, Bette Cerf Hill, helped relocate the company from New York to Chicago, securing rehearsal and office space, and supervising construction of the dance company’s permanent home on Randolph Street. He later served as vice president and then president of the Joffrey’s board and remained on its executive committee. Mr. Sagan’s influence extended to theater as well. He joined the board of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1983 and, as board president. Working with many of its famous actors, including co-founders Gary Sinise, Jeff Perry, and Terry Kinney, as well as John Malkovich, Tracy Letts, Joan Allen, and Laurie Metcalf, he helped lead the construction of a permanent, multi-stage home for the group, devising a then-novel use of tax-exempt bonds to finance the construction. “Bruce understood that if you wanted culture to last in Chicago, you had to build institutions,” said Greg Cameron, the Joffrey Ballet’s president.

In 1985, Mr. Sagan helped to create the Printers Row Lit Fest, the largest free outdoor literary event in the Midwest. It just celebrated its 40th anniversary and regularly draws more than 100,000 visitors to Chicago’s South Loop every September.

In 2024, President Biden presented Mr. Sagan with the National Medal of Arts, praising him as “a Chicago journalism legend and lifelong supporter of the performing arts” whose “seven decades of leadership and stewardship in building, protecting, and uplifting local newspapers, voices, artists, and dancers, have inspired his beloved city and enriched the tapestry of American life and culture.”

Mr. Sagan is survived by his wife of five decades, Bette Cerf Hill; his sons, Paul (spouse: Ann Burks Sagan) and Alex Sagan (spouse: Julie Altman), from his first marriage to Judith Sagan;

three stepdaughters, Catherine Hill (spouse: Doris Difarnecio), Teresa Neptune (partner: Zeb Lancaster), and Diana Lourenço Hill (spouse: Antonio Lourenço); 11 grandchildren, Jessica Neptune, Amelia Neptune, Katharine Sagan, Michael Bruce Sagan (named for his grandfather), Emma Sagan, Liliana Lourenço, Sara Lourenço, Liora Altman-Sagan, Isaac Altman-Sagan, Elizabeth Altman-Sagan, and Georgia Altman-Sagan (named for Bruce’s father, George); and eight great-grandchildren.

Reflecting on his career in later years, Mr. Sagan, known for frequently sporting one of his trademark cardigans and a bow tie, said simply, “The Herald taught me to be a publisher, and I used that skill to have a wonderful career.”

The family has not announced plans for a funeral. In lieu of flowers or other honoraria, the family suggests that friends consider making a gift to one of Mr. Sagan’s favorite charities, including the Joffrey Ballet, Steppenwolf Theater, the Chicago Public Library Foundation or the Bard Prison Initiative.

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