Tim Evans
2022
By Alvie Lindsay, news and investigations director, Indianapolis Star, and Evans’ colleague
When considering the greatness of Tim Evans, it would be enough – more than enough – to merely list the long list of important journalism that he has produced.
In his more than 40 years covering Indiana, Tim has earned more than 50 state and national awards from the Hoosier State Press Association, Inland Press Association, the Indiana Associated Press Media Editors and the Indiana Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He has won the AP Media Editors Kent Cooper Award, the Casey Medal for reporting on children’s issues, the Renner Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Medal of Freedom from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He was the SPJ’s 2009 Indiana Journalist of the Year.
Much of that has been accomplished over the past decade at The Indianapolis Star while covering social services, courts, consumer affairs and now as a member of the investigations team. He exposed failures at the Department of Child Services, including the misdeeds of the agency’s director who resigned in the wake of Tim’s reporting. He helped bring to light the city’s woeful efforts to protect witnesses in criminal cases. He helped illuminate scandalous actions by bad actors who would use the city and state’s lax housing rules to prey upon tenants and investors.
And, perhaps most notably, he was the first journalist to confront Dr. Larry Nassar – the man who eventually would be accused in the molestation of hundreds of young athletes and who would become the very visible face of the sexual abuse reporting scandal within USA Gymnastics that Tim and his teammates exposed.
Tim has come a long way since he began his career in 1977 as a 20-year-old banging out stories on a manual typewriter and developing film in a darkroom for the Greensburg Daily News, the first of five Indiana newspapers for which he would work. Two years later, he started an eight-year run with The Republic in Columbus, where he was a reporter and photographer covering city and county government, police and courts in Jennings and Decatur counties, and then became an editor. In 1987, he became managing editor of the Daily Record in Hickory, N.C., where he oversaw a news staff of 25 editors, reporters and photographers.
Not bad for a small-town boy who grew up in LeRoy, a small central Illinois farming community along I-74 between Bloomington and Champaign. Tim attended Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. He decided to pursue journalism for a simple enough reason: “I was curious and liked telling stories,” he says, “and newspaper journalism was the most accessible avenue for me to be able to do that.”
By 1990, Tim was back in Indiana, first as an editor and reporter for the Plain Dealer & Sun in North Vernon for three years, then as executive editor for the Flyer Group in Plainfield from 1993-97.
In 1997, Tim joined the Indianapolis Star. In Indy, Tim has covered city and county government, police and courts in Hendricks and Morgan counties; diversity and the changing face of Indianapolis and Indiana; state gaming; social services and children’s issues; state and federal courts; and consumer advocacy and investigations.
When I first came to the Indianapolis Star from the San Jose Mercury News in 2009, Tim impressed me right away. In fact, I recall not long after I came here reading one of Tim’s stories and thinking, “There’s talent in this newsroom. This guy is good.”
He is good, in great part because he has that rare combination of dogged reporting skills and a passion for storytelling. Tim is perfectly fine exposing the bad guys. But he’s just as comfortable – and just as adept – when he’s spinning one of his signature “only-in-Indiana” yarns.
And it’s not just his reporting and writing that serves our community. In his role as our consumer advocacy reporter, Tim helped usher in a program -- Call for Action -- that has saved Hoosiers $1.6 million and counting by using volunteers to help people with any number of issues. The volunteers adore Tim and Tim loves them right back.
Which leads me to the point I mentioned at the top.
It would be enough to list Tim’s journalism awards and accomplishments. But there’s more to Tim than the clips and kudos.
So much more.
Tim is a quiet leader in our newsroom. I can say without hesitation or reservation that he is among the most respected colleagues I have come across in my 39 years as a journalist. He is kind. He is compassionate. He cares deeply about the people he writes about. He cares just as deeply about the people he works with. As such, he has mentored countless other reporters, a few because I asked, most others just because.
Many of those mentees -- never shy to acknowledge Tim’s influence -- have gone on to successful careers elsewhere in journalism. Thankfully, for all of us, Tim has remained.
Simply put, Tim Evans embodies that rare intersection of the attributes I find most common among the best in our profession: He’s smart. He’s nice. He’s intellectually curious. He has a deep and sincere sense of justice.
Tim and his wife, the Rev. Jennifer Evans, have been married 30 years. They have a 21-year-old son, Morgan Evans, who was born two years after he began working at The Star.