Longtime AP reporter, Frances R. Mears, dies

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.  — Frances R. Mears, an Associated Press reporter, editor and bureau chief during a journalism career that spanned more than 40 years, died Saturday. She was 66.

Mears had been ill with cancer, said her husband, Walter R. Mears, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political writer and retired AP vice president.

After more than a decade in newspaper journalism, Fran Mears — then known as Fran Richardson — joined the AP in 1982 in Indianapolis, serving there as a legislative reporter and broadcast editor. In 1990, she was named news editor for Indiana after a brief hiatus from the AP when she was public relations director of the Hoosier Lottery.

Mears was promoted to assistant chief of bureau for Kansas and Missouri, based in Kansas City, in 1992. She was a key editor in coverage of massive flooding in the Midwest in the 1990s and of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

“She was smart, had strong news instincts and got along well with a staff of diverse personalities that you find in most any AP bureau,” said Paul Stevens, who became bureau chief in Indianapolis when Mears worked there and later brought her to Kansas City. “She had a wonderful knack for working with our members.”

Mears moved to Washington in 1996 to serve as manager of marketing communications in the Broadcast News Center. In 1997 she was appointed chief of bureau for Maryland and Delaware.

She left the AP in 2000 to become managing editor for news of the Gannett News Service in Washington, and retired in 2005.