The family lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, until John was about 13, when they moved to Washington, D.C., where his father began working with the New York Times bureau.
[1] When he was at Haverford, he and two friends were arrested and jailed when they entered the playing field during a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants in an attempt to shake the hand of baseball player Willie Mays, according to Norman Pearlstine, a friend and classmate, later editor-in-chief of Time magazine.
In 1966 he was hired by The Baltimore Sun, where he covered the Vietnam War[2] during which time he was accused of violating a news embargo and his credentials were removed by the U.S.
During his tenure in Lexington, he spearheaded an investigative series of reports titled "Cheating Our Children," which exposed flaws in Kentucky's public-education system.
In 1985 the newspaper published a series on widespread cheating in the University of Kentucky basketball program, which in 1986 won a Pulitzer Prize for its authors, Jeffrey Marx and Michael York.
In 2000, after nearly 10 years as editor of the Sun, Carroll was considering leaving to run Harvard's Nieman Fellowship program.
[6] In particular, the credibility of the Times had been hurt by revelations in 1999 of a revenue-sharing arrangement between the newspaper and Staples Center in the preparation of a 168-page magazine about the opening of the sports arena.
[10] After he left the Los Angeles Times in 2005, Carroll and his wife returned to Lexington, where he died in his home on June 14, 2015.
In 2004 he received the Committee to Protect Journalists' Burton Benjamin Award for lifetime achievement in defense of press freedom.
[13] A New York Times obituary described Carroll as "one of the most influential newspaper editors of his era" who saw journalists "almost as public servants and a free press as essential to a self-governing nation.