Mike Masterson, a longtime Arkansas journalist, died Sunday at the age of 78, according to his wife, Jeanetta McCroskey.

He had been battling squamous cell cancer of the neck since 2022.

From the beginning of his career, Masterson was an investigative journalist, championing those he felt were wrongly accused.

He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Arizona Republic, where he was twice a co-finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Masterson was also editor of three Arkansas daily newspapers and headed the master’s journalism program at Ohio State University.

He had served as a columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 2001.

“He’s just had an outstanding career in journalism,” said Walter E. Hussman Jr., chairman of WEHCO Media Inc., which owns the Democrat-Gazette. “When he would get on a story, he would just stay on it. If he felt like there was injustice there that had not been addressed, he would not let go of it.”

In his columns, Masterson often wrote about the things in which he was passionate, including “GodNods” and the dangers of pit bulls.

Masterson wrote that he came up with the term “GodNod” after reading about “Godwinks” in Squire Rushnell’s book “When God Winks at You.”

“Skeptics call them coincidences or aberrations. Not me,” Masterson wrote in a 2013 column. “I see these events for what I truly believe them to be: intervention from that which we can neither sense nor comprehend with our limited understanding.”

Masterson encouraged readers to send in their own “GodNods,” which he often retold in his columns.

Pit bulls became a topic of interest in his work after his wife, Jeanetta, and their taco terrier, Benji, were mauled by a pit bull mix in their Harrison neighborhood. Masterson then began advocating for stronger laws that hold dog owners who don’t restrain their pets civilly and criminally responsible.

“I admired his tenacity when he knew he was right on an issue,” said David Barham, editorial page editor for the Democrat-Gazette. “For best example, take the dangers of pit bulls that aren’t properly restrained by their owners. He was right on that issue, and he hammered it. His readers expected as much.”

Robert Steinbuch, a law professor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist and author of the treatise “The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act,” said he was saddened to hear of Masterson’s passing.

“He was such a powerful voice in Arkansas for transparency,” said Steinbuch. “My work with Mike in exposing government wrongdoing inspired me to pursue my personal interest in becoming a journalist. He and I became good friends. I’ll miss him dearly.”

Masterson was born in Harrison. His father was a military officer and the family moved often.

Ken Reeves of Harrison said he became friends with Masterson in junior high school. They used to fish together on Crooked Creek in downtown Harrison and double date in Reeves’ car.

Reeves also noted that Masterson’s mother was Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt’s sister.

“So this was his home,” Reeves said of Harrison. “It’s what he always considered home. It’s where his mom was from. And of course he came back here, to finish his life.

“Mike never totally left. He lived a lot of different places, but he stayed connected to Harrison.”

Masterson returned to Arkansas for college and graduated from what is now the University of Central Arkansas in 1971.

Then he become editor of the Newport Daily Independent, which was, at the time, the state’s smallest afternoon daily paper.

His work in Newport caught Hussman’s eye.

When Hussman moved from Camden to Hot Springs in 1973, he hired Masterson to work at the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, which was owned by Hussman’s family.

Masterson started at the Hot Springs paper as a “special writer,” he told The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville during a 2005 interview for the Arkansas Democrat Project.

A few months after starting work at the Sentinel-Record, Masterson was promoted to managing editor, and then executive editor.

“He just hit the ground running and made our coverage a lot better,” said Hussman. “He was really uncovering a lot of things that were going on in Hot Springs.”

In 1976, Masterson won an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year traveling the United States documenting the mood of Americans during that bicentennial year.

He returned to Hot Springs and worked at the newspaper until 1980, when he left to be a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. After a year there, Masterson was hired as an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Word got out that Rupert Murdoch was going to buy the Sun-Times, so Masterson — like many others at the Sun-Times — were looking for new opportunities.

Masterson contacted Hussman, who hired him to work in Little Rock as an investigative reporter for all of the WEHCO newspapers, which included the Arkansas Democrat as well as those in Texarkana, Camden, Hot Springs, El Dorado and Magnolia.

Those four years — 1982 to 1986 — working for WEHCO in Little Rock were the most productive of his career in many ways, Masterson told the Pryor Center.

In 1986, Masterson left Arkansas to head the investigative team at the Arizona Republic for three years. He then went to Ohio State for five years as the Kiplinger Chair director and professor and then to the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey to head their investigating team.

Masterson moved back to Arkansas in 1995 to serve as the editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville.

Five years later, he moved back to Harrison and worked for almost a year as communications director for American Freightways Corp., a trucking company that is now part of FedEx Freight Inc.

But Masterson’s heart wasn’t in it, said Reeves, who also worked for American Freightways.

“They were going to have to review and approve everything he wrote,” said Reeves.

Masterson didn’t like the sound of that.

As luck would have it, Hussman called Masterson about that time and asked him to return to journalism as a columnist for the Democrat-Gazette. So, Masterson did so in 2001.

Throughout his extensive journalism career, Masterson won over two dozen national honors for his reporting and column writing.

He was a four-time winner of the Paul Tobenkin Memorial award from Columbia University for his passionate writings against bigotry and intolerance.

Masterson’s work was honored four times by the Robert F. Kennedy Awards for columns and stories about the problems of the disadvantaged and underprivileged.

He was a two-time winner, with an additional citation, of the Heywood Broun Memorial Award for championing the causes of those without a voice. One of those Broun awards, in 1984, was for articles about the beating death of Marvin Williams, 21, a Black man who died in police custody in 1960.

The National Conference of Christians and Jews awarded Masterson a National Mass Media Gold Medallion for fostering the cause of brotherhood.

Masterson also won the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

“His columns and opinion writing over the years has resulted in freedom for three men who were wrongly charged with crimes they did not commit, including one on ‘death row,’” Jeff Jeffus, president of NWA Newspapers LLC, wrote in nominating Masterson for the Will Rogers award. “Mike’s digging for facts led to their ultimate release.”

Masterson also wrote many columns about issues with a large commercial hog farm in the Buffalo River watershed. That farming operation was eventually shut down.

He wrote many columns as well about the suspicious death of Olivia “Janie” Ward, 16, who died in 1989 at a teen party at a rural cabin near her hometown of Marshall.

“I think he was always championing the underdog,” said Hussman.

“His heart was always in the right place,” said Reeves. “That’s one of the things I always enjoyed about Mike.”

“I really loved Mike, a lot,” said Tommy Tice, head coach of the Farmington Cardinals football team, who met Masterson at a golf tournament in Berryville.

“Besides being a great friend, I really enjoyed his articles over the years,” he said. “I thought he was the best writer that I’d ever read. He’s not the best karaoke singer.”

Tice said he and Masterson would sing karaoke together at golf tournaments. Masterson always wanted to sing the Buddy Holly song “Oh Boy!”

“He was the lead singer,” said Tice. “I just can’t tell you how much personally I’m going to miss him.”

“Mike had a brilliant career, there’s no doubt about it,” said Don Walker, another old friend from Harrison. “Mike had the ability to probably be 14 forever. I admired that. We had a lot of good times.”

Masterson was a semifinalist to be the first journalist in space, but the Shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986 ended NASA’s plans to send civilians into space.

“So I filed my hopes to visit space away in the dust bin of life’s might-have-beens and moved through my career now exceeding half a century,” he wrote in a 2022 column.

Masterson often ended his columns with this sentence: “Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.”