When Chris Lester agreed to become The Beacon’s interim editor-in-chief in June 2025, he was supposed to help us through a transition.

He did that. But “transition” hardly captures what happened during his 15 months here.

Under Chris’ editorial leadership, The Beacon produced some of the strongest journalism in our young newsroom’s history.

“Dumped in Berger,” our six-month investigation with KBIA into more than 13 million pounds of hazardous material dumped in a small Missouri town, won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. Reporter Ceilidh Kern specifically credited Chris and KBIA’s Stan Jastrzebski for their editing and guidance on the project.

Our journalists also earned nine Missouri Press Association awards for work published in 2024 and two Kansas Press Association awards for work published in 2025. By the end of Chris’ tenure, every Beacon reporter had been recognized with an award for their journalism during the previous 18 months.

But awards tell only part of the story.

When Chris arrived, one of the things we asked him to help us do was build the editorial team that would launch Kansas City Documenters. We did. The program trained 59 Kansas Citians in its first three sessions to attend public meetings, take notes and help create a people-powered public record. Those notes quickly began generating reporting for our professional journalists, exactly as we hoped they would.

We recruited new journalists and expanded our capacity to cover the issues shaping people’s lives. We deepened our reporting on government, health, education, workforce and economic mobility. We strengthened collaborations with other newsrooms and built new civic partnerships.

And we grew.

More people found The Beacon. More people subscribed. More news organizations republished our work. More community members came into relationship with our newsroom, whether as readers, Documenters, event attendees, sources, partners or supporters.

That growth matters because Chris understood something fundamental about what we are trying to build here: Great journalism is the center of The Beacon, but our job doesn’t end when we hit publish. Journalism has to reach people. It has to earn trust. It has to be useful. And we have to build a newsroom strong enough to keep producing it.

Chris helped us do that.

He coached reporters. He recruited talent. He edited ambitious work. He helped us build partnerships and earn the confidence of supporters willing to invest in more journalism. And through a period of enormous growth and change, he brought the newsroom judgment, steadiness and care that we needed.

Last week, we gathered with journalists and friends from across Kansas City to celebrate Chris as he prepares for retirement.

Of course, we were celebrating much more than his time at The Beacon.

Chris spent nearly 24 years at The Kansas City Star as a reporter, columnist and editor. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Gerald Loeb Award winner. He later led journalism at Kansas City PBS and Flatland. His fingerprints are on decades of Kansas City journalism, and the room was full of people whose work and careers are better because Chris was part of them.

The Beacon got just 15 months of that career.

How lucky were we?

Chris, you came here when we needed you. You helped us build a stronger newsroom, produce journalism we are enormously proud of and prepare for the next chapter under Allison Dikanovic.

Your retirement celebration marked the close of many chapters, not just the one you spent with us.

But we are so lucky that The Beacon got to be your editorial capstone.

We will forever be lifted up by what you gave here.

Thank you, Chris.