Former Argus Leader publisher Larry Fuller dies at age 83

As originally published in the Argus Leader on Jan. 24, 2025.

The universal newsroom is quiet today.

Larry Fuller, a former editor and publisher of the Argus Leader in the ’80s and ’90s, had a gentle voice but a commanding message that resonated through all six newspapers he led across the U.S. over a 50-year journalism career: Honor your community, respect the privilege we have to tell vital stories and make a difference wherever you are and in any way you can.

And so, as a deeply committed champion of local journalism, he did.

Fuller died Thursday in Sioux Falls at the age of 83.

Fuller’s daughter, Beth Jensen of Sioux Falls, said the day before his death, while with him at a doctor’s appointment, he asked the nurses, “So what is going on in town? What’s happening in Sioux Falls?”

Forever curious, she said of her father.

Then, even on the morning of his death, he was finishing up a news release of the city's coming annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. He loved the parade, she said, and was grand marshal in 2017.

Every year, he took it upon himself to write that news release and then personally deliver it to every news outlet in town, “along with shamrock cookies from Hy-Vee.”

“Nobody loved Sioux Falls more than he did,” Jensen said.

A career that spanned half a dozen newspapers across the U.S.

Fuller grew up in Ohio and Michigan and began his inspiring journalism career at the Mason City, Iowa, Globe-Gazette and then the Minneapolis Star in the 1960s.

He then worked as the executive editor of the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Kentucky, from 1973 to 1977 before moving to Sioux Falls to become executive editor of the Argus Leader and, in 1978, its publisher.

When Fuller first began his leadership here, the Argus Leader was an afternoon newspaper, and one of his primary responsibilities was to transition to a morning newspaper.

“We had a lot of ‘Wake Up with the Argus’ coffee mugs around the house in my childhood,” Jensen said. “He tried so hard to get people to accept that it was going to be a morning newspaper.

“He always talked a lot about those early days,” she said.

In 1984, Fuller left Sioux Falls to work as corporate staff for Argus Leader's parent company, Gannett, before returning home two years later to resume his publisher role until 1993.

By the late ’90s, he and his wife, Suzanne, moved to Hawaii, where he was publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser and president of the Hawaii Newspaper Agency before retiring from journalism.

He and Suzanne returned to Sioux Falls for the last time in 2009, a community that called to him for decades.

Their return was “moving from paradise to paradise,” Fuller said in an interview with the Argus Leader in 2015. His daughter, Beth, was raising a family in Sioux Falls and his son, Mike, was raising his family in Minnesota.

“The warm weather was not worth being away from family,” he said.

Fuller was a community leader 'wherever he was'

A true journalist, Fuller wrote his own obituary years ago.

He prided himself on his “newspaper jammies,” founded his own school newspaper in high school, spearheaded Gannett’s transition to online journalism in the mid-’80s and then the Honolulu Advertiser’s transition from a weekly to a burgeoning multimedia operation in the early ’90s.

He was named Gannett Publisher of the Year in 1989.

“Larry was smart, thoughtful, energetic, personable and one-of-a-kind,” said Jack Marsh of Sioux Falls, a retired media and foundation executive who was hired as executive editor of the Argus Leader in 1992, when Fuller was publisher. “He was an advocate for excellence on the boards of multiple nonprofits, at the organizations he led and in the community he loved.”

Fuller served on the boards of Sioux Empire United Way, Children’s Inn, YMCA, Dow Rummel Village, the St. Patrick’s Day committee, the South Dakota Newspaper Association and was a founder of Forward Sioux Falls, an organization that is still active today and helps to develops new programs and address economic issues.

“That sustained community development initiative is widely credited with spurring the transformation of Sioux Falls into the vibrant, growing city of today, providing an enviable quality of life for its 220,000 residents,” Marsh said.

With a neighborly heart and as someone who believed deeply in the potential of our Queen City, Fuller gave his life to all of us.

“He had such an eye toward improving the community,” Jensen said. “He had a knack for appreciating the culture and the people wherever he was and respecting them and really making a difference.”

A lifelong appreciation for the news

Fuller exemplified an unwavering dedication to journalism, with a keen ear to our stories up until the day he died. Jensen said in her childhood, Fuller would ask everyone to bring news articles to the dinner table so they could talk about the stories.

“He felt it was so important to know what was going on in the news,” she said.

The most important news today is that we lost him, an infectious, powerful behemoth in Sioux Falls and an advocate to simply love where we live.

“South Dakota has lost an enthusiastic champion, respected journalist and a visionary civic leader,” Marsh said.