Christopher Eddings, longtime Daily Record executive, dead at 75

Christopher A. Eddings, a newsman whose talent for nurturing future leaders, zest for community service and rock-ribbed commitment to a free press were hallmarks of his career as a senior executive in the news industry, has died at 75.

He passed away Tuesday afternoon while under hospice care at Stella Maris from complications of lung cancer, his family said.

Eddings retired in 2014 as president of The Daily Record and director of publishing operations for The Dolan Company, whose group of publications now serves as the foundation of BridgeTower Media, one of the country’s largest business-to-business media companies with a presence in more than 25 markets.

“Chris Eddings was a newspaperman, through and through,” said Mark Stodder, the former executive vice president of Dolan. “It wasn’t so much that – to use the cliché – he ‘bled ink.’ It’s that he lived and loved every bit of newspapering, from the roll of the presses to serving communities, from defending the industry to working with all the people who make a news organization go.”

In the long arc of his career, Eddings received two lifetime achievement awards in two different regions of the country. And his creation of professional recognition events – particularly those that honor achievements by women leaders – became a touchstone of The Daily Record widely emulated by other news and community organizations.

A man with a razor-sharp, occasionally gruff wit and exacting professional standards, he inspired great loyalty and affection among his colleagues. “You always wanted to be on his team,” Stodder said.

He was active in a wide range of community issues and organizations. Civic and government leaders, respecting his independence and integrity, often asked his viewpoint on pressing issues.

“Chris was the consummate business professional. He aptly balanced his leadership role in the media with his role as a business leader who cared deeply about the community,” said Donald C. Fry, the retired longtime CEO and president of the Greater Baltimore Committee. “He was a kind, caring person who wanted to hear the opinions of others. In doing so, he earned the respect of all who crossed his path and was frequently sought after as a fair and reasonable sounding board on challenging issues.”

A New England native, Eddings joined The Daily Record as publisher in 1997 from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he supervised a group of 11 community newspapers in three states. Earlier in his career, Eddings published a number of daily and weekly newspapers in Massachusetts and Texas and also served as general manager of the European Edition of The Stars and Stripes in Darmstadt, Germany, its first civilian general manager since World War II.

Eddings became group publisher of The Dolan Company’s law publications group in 2003 and operations director in 2010. He was succeeded as publisher of The Daily Record in 2010 by Suzanne E. Fischer-Huettner, whom he mentored and promoted through the sales ranks; she is now also serving as a BridgeTower managing director.

“Chris had a strong commitment to the greater community and leadership groups who create change and opportunity,” Fischer-Huettner said. “Chris was raised by a single mom who was also in publishing, so he believed that women could be incredible leaders and elevated that belief, creating the growth vision for Top 100 Women, which is celebrating its 30^th anniversary in 2025.”

As a leader, Eddings was a stickler for efficiency: His somewhat obsessive system of organizing his professional email, the bane of modern communications, into an array of folders and subfolders simultaneously impressed and mystified those with whom he sought to share his techniques.

But he also was upbeat and warm. He could make an enjoyable outing of a job as odious as the annual spring cleanup of the moldering jetsam of publishing that piled up in The Daily Record’s Saratoga Street townhouse office. And he enjoyed an occasional evening of karaoke, especially if it gave him a chance to warble a Frank Sinatra standard or two.

Many of his close professional relationships became personal ones. D. Mark Singletary, a former publisher with Dolan who met Eddings while both had worked at a Texas publisher, recalled that Hurricane Katrina knocked out his home as well as his company’s office in 2005. Eddings invited Singletary to Baltimore to help maintain his company’s operations remotely.

“Without any hesitation, Chris welcomed me to Baltimore and offered all the help and assistance our staff and I needed to work and rebuild our lives,” Singletary said.

Eddings had a gift for mentoring. He was a patient if demanding teacher, one who set high standards yet was always encouraging.

“He saw leadership ability in me that I did not know I had, promoting me from classified account manager to sales leader, associate publisher and eventually publisher,” Fischer-Huettner said. “He selflessly stepped aside from the publisher role he loved to allow me to grow in my career.”

Maria Kelly, the former comptroller at The Daily Record and now a business intelligence analyst for BridgeTower, said, “I learned more from him than anyone in my entire career.”

Said Stodder: “He was the finest and most devoted mentor I’ve ever seen in this business. He saw the job of bringing along the next generation of leaders as a core part of his work – and he loved it and would put his all into teaching, showing, working alongside and then happily stepping aside to let his mentees take charge. This is the most important part of his legacy: ‘Chris’s people’ either went on to lead the company he left behind or thrived as leaders elsewhere.”

Eddings was a past board chair and director of Humanim, a statewide not-for-profit human services organization. He also served on the board of WorkFirst, the Greater Baltimore Committee, and, at various times, Baltimore Reads, a city-based literacy organization, the Maryland Commission on Civic Literacy and the Superintendent’s Panel on Excellence in Adult Education.

He was a president of the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, president of American Court and Commercial Newspapers, the New England Press Association and treasurer of the Public Notice Resource Center.

He was named to the New England Press Association Hall of Fame in 2008 and later given the Distinguished Service Award by the MDDC.

After his retirement, he served as a consultant and sounding board for nonprofit leaders. Gov. Larry Hogan named him to a term on the State Public Information Act Compliance Board, which seeks to resolve disputes about fees for access to public records.

A longtime resident of Pikesville, Eddings is survived by his wife, Denise, and their two sons, David and Sam. He is to be cremated, and arrangements for a future memorial tribute will be announced at a later time, the family said.

Tom Linthicum, a former senior editor at The Baltimore Sun whom Eddings hired to be The Daily Record’s vice president and executive editor in 2006, said the legacy of his old friend and boss would be an enduring one.

“Chris Eddings loved newspapers and the people who worked for them,” Linthicum said. “A champion of the free press and a free society, he dedicated himself and his newspapers to strengthening their communities and the common good. He took great pride that his award-winning newspapers consistently ranked at the top of their field for their news coverage and editorials.

“It was an honor to work for him.”