Ahearn to Succeed Mears as AP Executive Editor

William E. Ahearn, managing editor of the Associated Press, has been appointed executive editor to succeed Walter R. Mears, who will become Washington vice president and a political columnist for the news cooperative.

The appointments are effective Jan. 1, 1989.

Ahearn’s successor as managing editor will be Martin C. Thompson, 50, who has been AP’s bureau chief in Los Angeles.

Mears, whose Washington career spanned 23 years before he became executive editor, asked to return to the capital and to the political writing that was his specialty.

President Louis D. Boccardi said the change was in line with a plan established when Mears, 53, came to New York five years ago.

Mears, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his political reporting, will write three analytical columns a week for the AP in the new assignment.

Charles J. Lewis remains Washington bureau chief.

Ahearn, 45, has been managing editor since 1985. He joined the AP in 1971 in New York as a broadcast news writer after serving with the Army as an infantry officer in Vietnam.

Ahearn moved to the New York General Desk, the AP’s main news desk, in 1972. He was named enterprise editor in 1979 and assistant managing editor in 1981.

Thompson, 50, has been bureau chief in Los Angeles since 1986. He was bureau chief in San Francisco for 11 years before that. He joined the AP in Seattle in 1966, was named correspondent in Reno in 1968 and then transferred to the AP’s San Francisco bureau in 1970, where he served as news editor.