News Tribune reporter Craig Sailor, known for one-of-a-kind features, dies at 61
Salamanders in love. A cat moving into a conservatory. The legend of a wild man in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains.
Those were stories for News Tribune journalist Craig Sailor to chase, and everyone knew it.
The long-time journalist died at the age of 61 with friends at his side Thursday morning at Tacoma General Hospital from complications of an auto-immune disease he had battled for a number of years.
He had worked for The News Tribune since 1998 and prior to that worked at The Olympian newspaper in the state capital. It was part of a 40-year career following his graduation from San Jose State University that included a series of photographer and photo-editing jobs in the West, including stints in Reno, Nevada; California; Olympia and Tacoma.
Readers knew him best for his features, often long-form stories that explored the human condition, history and the natural world. He also wrote hard-hitting investigative pieces and explainers on complicated and nuanced subjects.
“Craig was an extremely talented and respected journalist and friend,” The News Tribune’s executive editor, Stephanie Pedersen, said in a statement Thursday. “His diverse interests made him a great storyteller who was full of curiosity. One conversation could start with his bees and a promise to bring fresh honey to the newsroom and end with sharing recipes for fancy cocktails he loved to mix. He was an amazing person, and we will miss him greatly.”
Sailor was born Nov. 30, 1963, in San Jose, California, the second son of J. Douglas and Florence Sailor. His brother, Brian Sailor, told The News Tribune on Friday that Sailor loved being out in nature and spending time with his family.
Sailor would take time off in the spring and fall each year to shuttle his mother between California and family property in Pacific County, Washington, where they groomed trails and gardened. His father died in 2018.
Sailor, who had no children of his own, doted on his three nieces, Heather, Heidi and Ashley, his brother said.
“He was always there for my daughters. He was always there for his friends. He was dedicated to our parents,” Brian Sailor said.
Sailor was known for his sense of humor and gift for gab. He could talk to anyone about anything.
“He had a gift for making people laugh and putting them at ease in any situation,” his brother said.
Sailor is survived by his mother, his brother, his nieces, cousin Linda Mayfield and her sons Adam and Sean, and legions of friends. Details of a celebration of life will be released at a later date.
A playful writer who was an ‘expert in people’
Local historian and former Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma told The News Tribune on Friday that Sailor was a lover of Tacoma history and that his reporting brought it to life.
“Boy, what a loss, what a loss,” Baarsma said.
He called Sailor in 2017 after learning that a former Tacoma mayor had been buried for 107 years in an unmarked grave.
“It became a front-page story,” Baarsma said.
The community found funds for a marker. Sailor was there when they uncovered it.
News Tribune food reporter Kristine Sherred remembered Sailor’s playful writing, including in his story about high school students who rescued “lovelorn amphibians” that were being thwarted by a fence that kept them from reaching ponds to breed.
“The newts are piling up like a chain-reaction wreck on a salamander highway,” Sailor wrote.
Sailor was “an expert in people and things and moments,” Sherred said in an email Thursday.
Olympian editor Dusti Demarest said on Friday that some of his great story ideas came from things he saw on the regular trip he made from his Tacoma home to the family property in Pacific County near Willapa Bay, Oyster Ranch.
“He really made that property into something, and he worked his tail off,” she said.
He planted acres of trees and created miles of trails, Demarest said, and hosted many gatherings. Invitations to his Flaming Man celebration each Fourth of July were coveted. (A play on Burning Man, she thinks.)
Sailor had a dry sense of humor, she said. When they worked on the Sound Life features team together at The News Tribune, the laughter carried across the newsroom.
“He moved through the world in a different way from most reporters and most people,” she said. “He was always looking for a good story, whether he knew it or not.”
He worked hard to authentically represent those he wrote about, she said.
‘People looked for the Craig Sailor name on a story.’
A former News Tribune editor remarked last year that if he saw a Sailor byline on a story, “It was a must read.”
“People looked for the Craig Sailor name on a story because you knew it was going to have those unexpected little comments and quirks,” Demarest said.
He also wasn’t afraid to go up against a challenging source.
“He definitely had a backbone,” she said. “He was not just a nice guy.”
Demarest also spoke about the impact Sailor had on The Olympian photo desk. He believed in involving visual journalists early in the brainstorming process with stories, she said.
News Tribune visuals editor Pete Caster said on Thursday that Sailor knew exactly what a photographer needed on one of his assignments and helped make it happen. There’s a certain type of reporter with “this unbelievable knack for telling the real stories of everyday life,” Caster said, and lucky newsrooms have them.
“I can imagine it being their first year on the job, they went down a rabbit hole, and they never got out of the rabbit hole,” Caster said.
Sailor was one of them.
“I always felt like he had this algorithm for zaniness in his head,” Caster said. “Out came this beautiful story.”
They chatted about visual journalism once a week or so and routinely ended up on hilarious tangents, he said. That’s how they decided to produce a video for one of Sailor’s recent projects in the style of “The Blair Witch Project.”
“He wanted to take what is a really serious job and try to get the most fun out of it,” Caster said. “He wasn’t overly cynical about the world. He was still super curious.”
News Tribune reporter Debbie Cockrell said in an email Thursday that Sailor “really did seem like everyone’s best friend.”
After a passing comment that an editor’s son liked apricots, Sailor showed up in the newsroom with a box for the boy from his family’s ranch.
Former News Tribune and Olympian photojournalist Tony Overman said Friday via text message that he was friends with Sailor for nearly half his life. Sailor hired him as a photographer in 1997 at The Olympian. It was Overman’s first time away from his hometown.
“Craig immediately welcomed me like family,” Overman wrote.
It’s not that people liked Sailor, Overman wrote. They loved him.
“People could tell he cared,” Overman said. “He was always positive, always friendly. He could handle any story with professionalism and grace and respect.”
Overman estimates he and Sailor covered a couple hundred stories together. Sailor always made a point to thank him and compliment his work.
Paving the way for the next generation of reporters
Sailor became a mentor in the newsroom. News Tribune reporter Julia Park said he urged her to ask many questions during her internship and told her that long-time reporters like him who “came of age in busy, noisy newsrooms,” would be happy to answer them.
She also remembers hearing him talk to sources on the phone, and how he coached her when she started covering breaking news.
“He was never too busy to scoot his chair over and help me with my struggles or share some advice,” she said in an email on Thursday.
When the newsroom gathered for pizza after work on her first day, she remembers him standing up at one point and doing a dance to “Gangnam Style.”
“That was the kind of person I came to know him as, always making people laugh and lightening the mood when work got hard or everyone just needed to loosen up,” Park said.
Peter Talbot, who covers criminal justice for The News Tribune, remembered how Sailor “could seamlessly shift” from an interview with a celebrity coming to Tacoma to writing about why a sculpture downtown was fenced off for years.
“Next he’d take you into White House records and newspaper archives to tell the story of the day Jimmy Carter stood on a limousine on Pacific Avenue,” Talbot said in an email Thursday. “He knew how to write funny, too. No small feat in the dry world of newspaper reporting. One of my favorite stories was about a black-and-white cat who had moved into the conservatory at Wright Park.”
The lead still makes Talbot smile.
“Who doesn’t, on a cold Tacoma day, want to say, screw it, I’m moving to Hawaii” Sailor wrote. “Cats might, too, if they could figure out how to buy an airline ticket. One Tacoma cat has almost done that.”
Sailor was also a fearless reporter who tackled breaking news, he said.
“I remember keeping an eye on a livestream of an anti-transgender protest in downtown Tacoma in 2022 that became more chaotic than I expected,” Talbot wrote. “Suddenly I heard a familiar voice on the video. It was Craig in the thick of it, documenting what was happening and asking questions.”
He also said that Sailor led the way for others.
“Craig was a trailblazer as an openly gay newspaper reporter in the late ‘90s. I know that wasn’t an easy time to be out, and he paved the way for gay journalists like me and my partner to be comfortable being ourselves at work,” Talbot wrote. “And his stories about Tacoma’s LGBTQ+ community made me feel more connected to our city. Craig had endless stories to tell. I just wish he never had to stop.”
A lifetime achievement award
Sailor reflected on his career in an interview with Out NW last year, “the premier LGBTQ+ media outlet for the Pacific Northwest,” according to its website.
“I do walk that fine line between representing my LGBTQ+ community and not being pigeon-holed as the ‘gay reporter’ in town,” he said. “I’m OK with that to a certain extent, but I’m not a one-trick pony. Hopefully, the queer community knows I’m there for them and the community at large knows that’s just one of many subjects I cover. After many years of going it alone, we now have multiple queer reporters at The News Tribune.”
Tacoma Pride presented Sailor with a lifetime achievement award in 2018 for his reporting. He downplayed it at the time.
“This seems to have kicked the hornet’s nest,” he posted on Facebook in 2018, with a link to a story he wrote about a local billboard with a message against white supremacy. “I’m getting emails and social media threats. Nothing I can’t handle. And it won’t stop me from doing my job ... in other news: Tacoma Pride is giving me a Big Gay Award today.”
Sailor explained to Out NW how he loved photography, and that he started working at his junior college paper when a friend told him the photographer there quit. That started a 20-year career in photojournalism, followed by 20 more years editing and reporting stories.
“My favorites are ones where I make readers cry – or laugh,” he told the magazine. “I like to provoke an emotional response. Sometimes, I just like to dig deep or enlighten readers about facets of their local community that they were unaware of.”
Journalists are vital to democracy, he said, and it made him sad to think many people don’t understand that.
What kept him going, he told the reporter, is that readers told him that they appreciated his work.
“There are so many stories to tell,” he said. “My life will not be long enough to tell them all.”
This story was originally published May 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
