alumni profiles

Bill Dunn leaves ‘Sentinel’
after 32 years

	Bill Dunn with wife Sandy

by Debbie Crossley Meyers

When Bill Dunn, JM 1969, announced he was leaving The Orlando Sentinel after 32 years, a friend warned him to be “careful about changing jobs every 32 years…it doesn’t look good on your resume.”

Dunn said he will miss “his newsroom colleagues, working on big stories, writing headlines that sing, designing front pages on blockbuster news days” and—oh, yeah, winning a Pulitzer.

“Every day was new, with a new paper to put out—not many jobs have that kind of built-in variety,” he said of his passion for the newspaper work. “It was satisfying, too, to have had a hand in the growth of the Sentinel into a major regional newspaper.”

Dunn accepted an “early retirement” buyout offer from the Sentinel in August.

While at UF, he served as sports and UF campus correspondent and was among the newspaper’s first college interns.

He was named most distinguished graduate by the campus chapter of Sigma Delta Chi.

His favorite teachers included H.G. “Buddy’ Davis, who made classes “an adventure, imprinting indelible lessons with his colorful teaching techniques, such as locking the door to latecomers and rubber stamping GREAT ZOT on spelling errors.” He was also inspired by Hugh Cunningham, who taught “with such enthusiasm that students knew they were learning from someone who was a real newspaperman at heart.”

After graduation, Dunn served as a reporter, Florida Magazine editor, newsfeatures editor, managing editor, associate managing editor/photo, graphics and design, then section development and design editor.

In 1992, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for local investigative reporting with a series of articles he helped initiate. For the last three years of his career, he coordinated a front-to-back redesign of the paper.

Bill and his wife, Sandy, live in College Park. Their son, William, is a fourth-year dental student at UF.

“I expect to take on some ‘labor of love’ publishing projects and, perhaps, teach magazine writing at the University of Central Florida,” he said. “And what I’d really like to concentrate on is writing a novel.”