John B. Edwards, editor and publisher of The Smithfield Times, has been named the winner of the Virginia Press Association’s 21st annual D. Lathan Mims Award for Editorial Leadership in the Community. The award was presented Saturday at the association’s annual meeting in Roanoke.

The award, presented for work published in 2007, is named for the late D. Lathan Mims, a former editor and general manager of the Daily News-Record and a former president of the press association. The award was first presented in 1988 for the 1986-87 contest year.

Edwards previously won the award in 1998-99 and 2002. He has won the Mims award – the association’s highest individual honor for an editor – more times than any other Virginia journalist.

The competition was judged by Sandra Mims Rowe, daughter of Lathan Mims. She is editor of The Oregonian in Portland and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper. Before moving to Portland in 1993, she was executive editor of The Virginian-Pilot.

Since 1993, The Oregonian has won five Pulitzer Prizes and Rowe has been president of ASNE and chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. This year, she and her executive editor, Peter Bhatia, were selected as Editor and Publisher Magazine’s editors of the year.

Of Edwards’ entry, Rowe wrote:

“John Edwards’ writing is infused with deep knowledge of his subjects, clarity of position, respect for the individual and the core values of citizens.

“He demonstrates an abiding love of his community through editorials and columns on issues crucial to the future of a rural county struggling with the pressures of urbanization from nearby population centers. 

“His concern for the preservation of the county's rural and agricultural heritage extends from innovative use of conservation easements, to the placement of roads, to praise of crabgrass as ground cover.

“He  consistently argues forcefully for the public's interest in open and transparent government and the need for public participation in decision making.

“Reading John Edwards’ work, one believes that Smithfield residents will never find that their town has been forever changed while the newspaper was napping, as has happened in so many communities pressed by development. 

“His work exemplifies the belief D. Lathan Mims lived: that newspapers and their editors should play a vital role in advancing the interests of their communities.”         

The Mims competition is for individual writers of editorials, signed commentaries or editorial page columns at a non-daily or specialty publication of any size or a daily publication with circulation of 40,000 or less.

The award was created in 1987 to memorialize Mims’ conviction that newspapers and their editors should be active, caring parts of the communities they served. He believed that a newspaper should support those things which would make a community a better place in which to live and oppose those things which detract from the quality of life.

Entries are judged on skill in writing, clarity of position, fairness in handling of issues, appropriate use of pertinent facts, and vision of the community’s needs, both present and future.

While Edwards has won the Mims award three times, it has been won twice by Robert Benson of the Danville Register and Bee; P. Lea Campbell, now retired from The Recorder in Monterey; William C. O’Donovan of The Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg; and Ken Woodley of The Farmville Herald.

Other nominees for the 2007 Mims award were Mary Kimm, the Mount Vernon Gazette; Rob Humphreys, the Culpeper Star-Exponent; Marlene Miller, the Mount Vernon Voice; Anne Adams, The Recorder; and Robert Benson, the Danville Register and Bee.