Wiley W. Hilburn

Who is Wiley W. Hilburn?

Wiley Wilson Hilburn, Jr., is a prominent journalist in Ruston, Louisiana, whose communications career began in the late 1950s when he was a student at Louisiana Tech University. In 1968, at the age of thirty, Hilburn returned to his alma mater to chair the Journalism Department and serve as director of the college news bureau. Even while instructing budding journalists for some four decades, he continues to write a popular weekly column carried by Gannett in both the Shreveport Times and the Monroe News Star. He retired from the university position after forty-one years on September 1, 2009.

In 1962, Hilburn, at twenty-four, became an editorial writer for the Shreveport Times, one of the youngest such writers in the nation. That same year, Patrick J. Buchanan, also born in 1938, began writing editorials for the former St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Buchanan was, however, still twenty-three when he assumed his position in St. Louis. Prior to his joining the Shreveport Times, the largest newspaper in north Louisiana, Hilburn was the telegraph editor of the former Monroe Morning World of Monroe, the seat of Ouachita Parish.