YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Eight prominent media professionals – including three pioneers and Dan O’Brien, managing editor of The Business Journal – will join the Youngstown Press Club Hall of Fame this year.
Simeon Booker, who was best known for his coverage of the Civil Rights movement; Helen Hart Hurlbert, who was publisher of the Warren Tribune Chronicle; and Warren P. Williamson Jr., who founded WKBN radio 100 years ago and was a nationally known radio pioneer, will be inducted into the newly established media pioneers category.
The other inductees include Boots Bell, the disc jockey whose voice and personality dominated WHOT radio from 1959 to 1975; Carolyn Martindale, who directed Youngstown State University’s journalism program for 23 years; Mark Niquette, who has been a Bloomberg News reporter for the past 15 years; and Bob Yosay, retired chief photographer at The Vindicator.
“We’re proud to announce the 2026 Hall of Fame inductees,” said Elise Skolnick, president of the Youngstown Press Club. “These eight individuals represent the best of their fields. They dedicated their careers to keeping our region informed and connected, helping fill a critical need in our community.”
They will be inducted at the press club’s Hall of Fame and Awards Dinner at 5 p.m. Sept. 23 at Stambaugh Auditorium.
Dan O’Brien
O’Brien has been writing and drawing about Mahoning Valley business and politics for 39 years for The Business Journal.
A Youngstown native who attended Ursuline High School, he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from YSU.
As a YSU undergraduate, O’Brien landed his first newspaper job as the resident political cartoonist at The Business Journal, taking on his most famous and favorite subject, U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr.
His cartoons and caricatures have also appeared in The Plain Dealer, the Washington Monthly and numerous editions of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year.
In 1998, O’Brien became a full-time staff reporter at The Business Journal, where he covers advanced manufacturing, the automotive and oil and gas industries and state and local government.
He has received three first place Ohio excellence in journalism awards from the Press Club of Cleveland.
He is an adjunct history instructor at YSU and Kent State University at Trumbull.
O’Brien and his wife, Michelle, live in Youngstown near their two sons and two grandchildren.
Simeon Booker
Growing up in Youngstown, Booker’s first publication was a four-line poem in The Vindicator. In high school, he was sports editor of the Buckeye Review, Youngstown’s small Black weekly.
Booker reported for the Baltimore Afro American and the Cleveland Call and Post before winning a Harvard Neiman Fellowship and becoming the first black reporter at The Washington Post.
He was also a syndicated radio commentator for Westinghouse Broadcasting.
As Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent for Jet and Ebony magazines for more than 50 years, he became known as the “Dean of the Black Press.”
His coverage of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi and the subsequent trial are among the most famous pieces of Civil Rights-era journalism.
Booker, who died in 2017 at age 99, is the author of “Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement,” published in 2013 by the University of Mississippi Press. Booker received an honorary doctorate degree from YSU in 2013.
The Simeon Booker Award for Courage has been given annually since 2016 during Ohio Nonviolence Week in Youngstown.
Helen Hart Hurlbert
For more than half a century, Hurlbert was one of the few female executives in a male-dominated Mahoning Valley media landscape.
Having become publisher of the Warren Tribune Chronicle in 1936, she shaped not only one of Ohio’s oldest daily newspapers but also the civic identity of an entire region through eras of prosperity, upheaval and transformation.
She inherited the publisher’s chair from her mother, Zell Hart Deming, one of the country’s earliest female newspaper executives.
Hurlbert modernized the newspaper’s operations, expanded its reporting capacity and maintained its independence, using it to promote economic development, public welfare and community institutions.
In 1952, she became a cross-platform media executive when she bought WRRN radio and changed its call letters to WHHH to match her initials.
In acquiring the radio station, she extended the newspaper’s civic mission onto the airwaves by providing local news, public service programming and community bulletins.
In 1979, Hurlbert retired with the title of publisher, as her daughter, Zell Draz, became the newspaper’s associate publisher.
Hurlbert died in 1987 at age 94.
Warren P. Williamson Jr.
Williamson, who became founder and chairman of WKBN Broadcasting Corp., cultivated his interest in radio as a 17-year-old wireless operator with the Army Signal Corps, who was stationed in Texas near the Mexican border during World War I.
Thinking that establishing a radio station would help a radio repair business he was engaged in, Williamson founded the Mahoning Valley’s first radio station – WKBN, whose first broadcast emanated from his Auburndale Avenue house Sept. 26, 1926.
The station established a studio at the Youngstown YMCA by the following year and moved to its Sunset Boulevard building in 1952.
WKBN established the Valley’s first FM station in 1947.
WKBN-TV – the Valley’s first television station – began transmitting in 1953 and became the first Youngstown station to use videotape in 1959. Color TV broadcasting began there in 1965.
Williamson served for 27 years on the Youngstown Board of Education and was a member and director of the South Side Merchants and Civic Association.
Aside from being a civic leader, he was also a philanthropist, donating $1.9 million to YSU, whose business college is named in his honor. The university bestowed an honorary doctorate on him in 1990.
Williamson died in 1996 at age 96.
In 2006, his family gave YSU an additional $5 million for construction of a new building for the university’s business college.
Boots Bell
Ralph Ross Bellito, known on the air as Boots Bell, was born in Cleveland in 1933 and was a disabled veteran of the Korean War.
His first radio job was at WBUZ – a small station in western New York. When Myron Jones, WHOT’s co-founder, heard Bell, he recommended him for a job at WHOT.
There, as a member of a group of disc jockeys known as The Good Guys, Bell appeared at numerous remote broadcasts. WHOT Day, where fledgling bands performed, was a highlight at Idora Park each summer.
Bell’s upbeat personality and larger-than-life persona enabled him to move into TV as well in the mid-1960s. He was the host of “Dance Party” and a talk show titled “What Generation Gap?,” both on WYTV Channel 33.
Besides WHOT, Bell had stints on other Valley radio stations, including WGFT and WNIO, and helped start CD-106 – The Wolf.
In the mid-1970s, he began teaching broadcasting and advertising at YSU, where his classes became so popular that students not enrolled in them would listen in from the hallway.
Bell died in July 1993.
Carolyn Martindale
Martindale received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Kent State University and, early in her career, worked in communications roles with the United Presbyterian Church and the New York State Public Affairs Committee.
She was a general assignment reporter and an entertainment writer at The Youngstown Vindicator before joining YSU, where she was the faculty adviser to the student newspaper – The Jambar – for 15 years.
Through The Jambar and the journalism classes she taught, she helped to shape a generation of reporters, editors and communicators working in the Valley and far beyond.
In addition, hundreds of high school students participated in the YSU Press Day events she organized, which featured local media members as speakers and seminar leaders.
Martindale wrote numerous books and academic papers focused on how minorities were unjustly covered by the media during the Civil Rights movement, including her 1986 book titled “White Press and Black America.”
In 1985, YSU honored her with a distinguished professor award for excellence in teaching, research and scholarship.
Martindale retired from the university in 1996 and died in 2017.
Mark Niquette
Niquette has been a reporter covering government, politics and the economy for more than 35 years.
He began his career at The Vindicator, where one of his earliest assignments was helping to cover the 1991 murder of reputed mob boss Joseph “Joey” Naples.
A year later, Niquette became the paper’s politics writer, covering investigations into public corruption and organized crime, the fall of Traficant, local and state elections and presidential candidate visits to the Valley.
After a brief time at The Akron Beacon Journal, he worked for 10 years at The Dispatch in Columbus, where he covered business, state-level politics and government and presidential elections in Ohio.
At Bloomberg News, Niquette has covered national breaking news, municipal finance and state government, presidential and midterm elections and the intersection of the economy, government and politics.
A native of Kaukauna, Wis., Niquette earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. He and his wife, Lisa, former Vindicator business editor, live in Upper Arlington, Ohio.
Bob Yosay
A 1971 graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School, Yosay received a bachelor’s degree from The Ohio State University in 1975.
As a boy, he delivered about 90 daily and Sunday newspapers for nearly five years.
What began as a paper route grew into a lifelong connection to newspapers, journalism and photography.
As a college student, Yosay had summer jobs in The Vindicator’s composing room and photography department. He was a full-time Vindicator staff photographer from 1976 to 2019, having been promoted to chief photographer in 1990.
Yosay called The Vindicator a family-like organization dedicated to outstanding journalism and community service, where he learned from some of the best professionals and proudly worked for 43 years.
Yosay and his wife, Janet, have three children and four grandchildren.