John Stehr
2025
By Nelson Price
John Stehr crafted a career over nearly four decades that included reporting on events large and small, global and local, but always focused on the people most affected by them.
Now retired from broadcast news but serving as mayor of Zionsville, Stehr still reflects on the path of his career and the choices he made. Usually, this included being ready to go into action when news broke.
For example, immediately after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Stehr and a camera/production crew from WTHR-TV in Indianapolis drove to Washington, D.C., to interview Hoosiers. Air travel had ground to a stop and the country’s capital was deserted, with every government building locked down. Broadcasting live, Stehr described the eerily empty streets, sidewalks and parks this way:
“It’s like Christmas morning – but without the joy.”
Stehr, the evening news anchor for WTHR for a record-setting 24 years, managed to interview Hoosiers who had been at the Pentagon, a target of the terrorists. The Hoosiers, who were Pentagon consultants, not military, were on an upper floor of the section when the building was hit; their escape route included stepping over debris from the attack.
For the next five days, Stehr and his team gathered and broadcast multiple live satellite reports for all of WTHR’s major newscasts, with timely interviews and updates, including interviews with Indiana’s two U.S. senators and several congressional members.
The next year, Stehr accompanied then-U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar to Russia for a documentary about efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, a trip that included visits to sites previously inaccessible to Western journalists. That documentary won a regional Emmy Award, one of three that Stehr received during a broadcasting career that included, near the beginning, anchoring weekday TV newscasts when he was just 21 years old.
It also included shifting from a high-profile stretch as a correspondent and anchor for national networks CBS News and CNBC to local TV news with a long-running stint in Indianapolis as WTHR’s lead anchor and special projects reporter beginning in 1995.
“I have a family, and I wanted stability,” Stehr explained in an interview for this profile, noting that his network career had involved travel to 46 U.S. states and foreign countries ranging from Mexico to Greece.
Stehr and his family settled in Zionsville, where he was elected mayor in 2023. He had retired from his journalism career in 2019 after making a significant impact at WTHR, an NBC affiliate.
“John brought a sense of trust, authenticity, authority and stability that resonated not only with viewers, but throughout the newsroom as well,” said Anne Marie Tiernon, who became his co-anchor at WTHR in 2004.
In nominating Stehr for the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, Chris Wright, WTHR’s former chief meteorologist, wrote: “John was a true newsroom leader and the consummate broadcast professional over more than four decades in small, medium and large markets, as well as at the network level.”
Stehr was born in 1958 in Pittsburgh, where his father, a German immigrant, was a landscaper and his mother had been a librarian. As a boy, he was captivated by watching Walter Cronkite anchor the CBS Evening News.
“I understood immediately that what he was talking about was significant,” Stehr recalled. “I never considered doing anything else.”
As a star soccer player in high school, he won a scholarship and studied communications and political science at Gannon University in Erie.
Erie also is where, while still a college student, he began working as a reporter in radio and TV. In March 1980, WSEE-TV in Erie named him weekday lead anchor even though Stehr was just 21 years old. That was followed by stints at WOTV (now WOOD-TV) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and WISH-TV in Indianapolis, then more than six years as a news anchor in Salt Lake City at KUTV.
“I always regarded these journalism jobs as positions of public trust,” Stehr said. “I took that trust very seriously.”
He left Salt Lake City in 1989 for the national network jobs, beginning with anchoring business news for CNBC’s “The Money Wheel.” Next came working as a national correspondent for CBS News, which included anchoring “CBS Morning News”. During his series of jobs , including his 24 years at WTHR in Indianapolis, he interviewed notables ranging from Barack Obama in the White House to Mike Pence, then a U.S. representative, when Stehr accompanied him to Afghanistan to report on Hoosiers involved in the war there, and to Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
Reporting from the Vatican, Stehr covered the canonization of Mother Theodore Guerin, the first Catholic saint from Indiana. After leading a troop of nuns from France to the Indiana wilderness in 1840, Mother Theodore Guerin went on to found orphanages, schools, pioneer versions of pharmacies, and St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Terre Haute, the nation’s oldest Catholic liberal arts college for women.
Stehr also covered several inaugurations of U.S. presidents and presidential funerals.
Asked to identify his most challenging assignments, Stehr referred to Hoosiers whom he interviewed on “the worst day in their lives”: People devastated by tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters.
His colleagues said that Stehr’s sincerity and warmth helped distraught interview subjects open up. Wright, who subsequently became the chief meteorologist at WTTV CBS4, a competitor to WTHR, also emphasized that, in addition to anchoring and interviewing, Stehr “was integral in shaping the content and writing copy” for the evening newscasts.
Stehr’s honors include the Silver Circle award from the Lower Great Lakes chapter of the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences and induction into the Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame.
Although Stehr shifted from national network posts to anchoring a local newscast to establish a stable base for his home life, he was on the road with WTHR to cover Democratic and Republican national conventions, two Olympics and the aftermath of the 9-11 tragedy.
When he retired in 2019, Stehr said he did not intend to seek political office. He planned to dedicate his time to community service (he served as president of Zionsville’s parks and recreation board) and to his family. Stehr and his wife, Amy, are the parents of Morgan, Connor, Jeanie, Riley and Meredith. His eldest son, Jared, died at age 4 from congenital heart and lung issues.
The campaign for mayor, where, running as a Republican, Stehr was unopposed in the general election, happened because he felt there were communication problems with previous officials in the Boone County city, which has a population of about 33,000. “My goal is to put Zionsville in a position to flourish,” he said.
He plans to run for re-election in 2027 but emphasized that he has no higher political ambitions.
“I will never run for anything else. I see what I’m doing now as a return to public service that was always on my mind during my career in journalism.”