50 Years of Photographs

Marilyn Newton was with the Reno Gazette-Journal for more than 51 years beginning in 1963.

She started her journalism career six years earlier when at the tender age of 12 she was hired by the Carson City Nevada Appeal as a papergirl making her among the first paid papergirls in the country.

She had her first story (a two paragraph sports story) published at the age of 12 and her first photo published just a year later.  She continued working for the Appeal throughout high school and for a year after graduation.

She then attended the University of Nevada but was hired by the Reno Evening Gazette after just one semester. Within two weeks she wrote her first front-page story and within six months she was packing a camera.

She has won close to 400 national, regional and state awards.  In 1992 she was named Nevada Photographer of the Year.  In 2002 she was inducted into the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame and that year also won the national media award presented by the National Leukemia Society for her photos of a childhood cancer cluster.

She was named an honorary colonel in the Nevada National Guard in 2005.

She has published three books thus far.  Two were collaborative efforts.  The first was a photo book of the flood of 1997.  The second was the Donner Party Chronicles for which she did the photos.  Frank X. Mullen wrote it.

In 2003 “Alkali Angels, a book she both wrote and photographed was released. She was also hired as a photographer for the America 24/7 project which documented the country during one week.  The outcome will be a state book as well as three national books.

Her next project will be a collection of her photos from the last 40 years.