Can't Quit It   

After a year in academia, Chris Peck will return to the daily news business as editor of Memphis' Commercial Appeal.

Chris Peck decides he belongs in the newsroom after all, accepting the position of editor at Memphis' Commercial Appeal as of January 1. Peck, 52, left the editorship of Spokane's Spokesman-Review after 19 years in the job last December during a time of difficult staff cuts (see Bylines, December), saying he wanted to do some steelhead trout fishing while deciding where he could be most effective "actually trying to save journalism." He went fishing--once--and entered academia, becoming the Belo Distinguished Chair in Journalism at Southern Methodist University. Though Peck has only good things to say about SMU, he "really very much missed the pace of the newsroom" and was ready to go back when the E.W. Scripps Co. paper contacted him. "Upon further reflection," he says, "I really think that the real fight probably has to be waged in newsrooms and in a real community." Peck replaces Angus McEachran, 63, the last editor of the now-defunct Pittsburgh Press, who is retiring. McEachran, a native Memphian, spent most of his career at the 174,000-circulation Commercial Appeal, where as metro editor he directed coverage of Martin Luther King's assassination and Elvis Presley's death.