Editor’s Note: Our regular Monday morning column, “Palmer’s Pen,” will not appear this week as we celebrate the career and leadership of outgoing editor John Schwing.

By John H. Palmer

Regular readers of this column might be surprised to find out that I have a softer side. I’m going to dedicate this space this week to say goodbye and good luck (and, probably, see ya later) to our esteemed and irreplaceable interim editor, John Schwing.

Schwing, who has lent his decades of journalistic experience in Connecticut to the Westport Journal since its founding in 2021 under former editor Jarret Liotta, will be stepping aside after Memorial Day to enjoy some well-earned time off. He’s not calling it a retirement; he knows better that old-school journalists and editors never really retire. They just take breaks to recharge. I have no doubt he’ll be climbing the walls by Election Day to find out what news stories are breaking.

“I first met John over lunch on June 29, 2021, just three weeks before we launched Westport Journal,” recalled publisher Doug Weber. “I remember being very impressed with John’s demeanor. He was serious (the news business is serious), but he has always leavened his work with a healthy dollop of humor.”

We’ve known this day was coming for a while. It’s why I’m here. I was hired to be Schwing’s replacement, and for the last three months I’ve soaked in his tutelage like a sponge, and I’ve got huge shoes to fill. I’ve come to respect him as a tutor and friend, and because of our shared first name, we’ve become known in the newsroom as simply “Palmer” and “Schwing.” I’m very lucky to learn from him.

Excellence and reputation built from years of experience

In a job interview for a reporter position some years ago, a former editor of mine commented, “All Connecticut journalists sleep together,” and that stuck with me. No matter who we worked for, or with, or competed against, we all knew each other and at some point or another we would cross paths. So, the message, basically, was “don’t screw up your reputation in this small state because you may need it someday.”

John Schwing and I have worked together several times in the past, yet we never met each other until about three months ago when I first started freelance writing for the Westport Journal.  We got along really well and he saw something in my writing and my copy quality that led him to think I was ready to take on the tumble dryer life that serving as editor can be. I‘m grateful to follow in his footsteps and I hope I can be a fraction of the editor he is.

I worked for the editorial department at the Connecticut Post for a short time in the early 2000s, where Schwing worked as a metro editor; that is, he was responsible for knowing everything there was to know about Fairfield County and keeping track of the news his reporters dug up. That’s where he developed his deep knowledge of small communities in Connecticut and learned how to question everything, something every journalist takes a lifetime to learn. I walked by his desk in that busy newsroom hundreds of times and we never once spoke, but I knew who he was and what he represented – a penultimate newsman hell bent on doing the job right.

“He’s trained every cub reporter in southern Connecticut for two decades,” Weber recalls a friend in the business once said to him, and he’s not wrong. Any reporter in Connecticut, and certainly Fairfield County, can say they’ve either worked for and learned from him, or otherwise have heard about his reputation.

“John hired me fresh out of college for my first full-time reporting job at the Fairfield Citizen-News many decades ago,” said our education reporter, Linda Conner Lambeck. “We would work together again at the Connecticut Post and now at the Westport Journal. I will miss him greatly.”

Later, I worked for him (unknowingly at the time) when I was a freelance writer for the Darien News and New Canaan News, both small weeklies under his supervision of a group of five weeklies published by Hearst Connecticut Media Group. He’d never let me call him legendary, so I’ll let others do it.

“John Schwing is a legend in Fairfield County news,” said Ashley Varese, former editor of the two weeklies, and now an editor in Daytona. Like me, she said she first heard his name in 1999 as a young reporter at the Norwalk Hour, but didn’t have the pleasure of working with him until around 2011 when he became her boss at Hearst.

“He trusted our newsroom and gave us the freedom to work on projects we cared about. He always had our back, whether someone was complaining about a story or something was brewing internally (and something always was),” she said. “The best part about working with John was that he got it – he subscribed to the work hard, play hard journalism model.”

An unassuming, quiet, and humble seeker of the truth

Schwing grew up in Connecticut, and graduated from Boston University, but ever the Connecticut boy, he settled into his journalism career in 1976 as editor of the Fairfield Citizen-News. In 1985, he became managing editor of the now-defunct Fairpress until he found his way into the newsroom as county editor at the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport in 1988.

Later, he became editor and founder of the Fairfield Minuteman until 1998, when he found himself back at the Post until 2010, when Hearst hired him to the supervising editor for a group of Fairfield County weeklies. In 2021, he joined the Westport Journal as consulting editor, and then took over as interim editor upon the departure of former editor Thane Grauel in August 2024.

An early riser, his neighbors in New Haven could probably hear him tap-tapping away at his keyboard at 3 a.m. as he edited last night’s story about the Planning and Zoning Commission or the latest Staples High baseball game, making sure it was perfectly presented on our site for your morning report.

While the hour of 3 a.m. may not work for my circadian rhythms, he has always found that early hour to be a time of peace and concentration without distractions, as well as a way to make sure that the latest news was reported before the competition.

“I became a journalist because I am terrible at math (and yet I’m doing one more budget story?!) and have no other marketable skills,” Schwing joked with me the other day, when I asked him to tell me about why he became a journalist and to share memories of a story that stands out in his mind. “It’s a long list of diminishing returns.”

As if. Schwing developed an ability to become a sponge for information. He could probably tell you who ran for office in places like Monroe back in 1979, or recall like it happened yesterday a town issue that erupted in the 80s in tiny places like Shelton or Cheshire or Brookfield. His quippy humor lent to his ability to write entertaining headlines.

“There’s nothing complicated to say about John Schwing,” says our reporter Gretchen Webster, who has worked with Schwing on three different newspapers and followed him to help launch the Westport Journal. “He is simply a consummate journalist. John stands for everything a journalist should be, which has become excruciatingly important as the free press – the backbone of democracy – has been weakened in recent years.”

More often than not, his lean towards conservative news judgement would find him kicking a reporter’s story pitch back, in search of that one more voice in the story or one more official confirmation of a fact that was in question. His quest to report the most correct news possible – as opposed to the first – and his amiable, pleasant demeanor allowed him to develop mutually respectful relationships with town officials and gained the trust and respect of the many reporters and editors who have worked with him over the years.

I’ve been joking around to Schwing that if I had my way, we’d chain him to the wall and not let him leave the newsroom here in Westport. But alas, that’s not legal, and even the most content caged bird must be allowed to exercise his wings once in a while. He’d like to sneak out the back door, unnoticed and without any fanfare. We won’t let that happen.

So, Schwing, we wish you well as you continue along your storied path as a Fairfield County journalist, and we won’t necessarily call this goodbye. See you again sometime soon, and thank you for your friendship and direction that you have brought to this news organization.

John Palmer, a Norwalk native, is editor of the Westport Journal, and has covered community news in Fairfield County and Massachusetts for over 30 years. He can be contacted at jpalmer@westportjournal.com.