Bruce Sagan, the longtime newspaper publisher who owned the Hyde Park Herald and the Southtown Economist newspapers, and a National Medal of the Arts recipient who worked to bring the Joffrey Ballet from New York to Chicago in 1995, died on Sept. 21 at his Streeterville home. He was 96.

Sagan’s death was confirmed by his son, Paul, who said that his father had died after a brief cancer illness. Sagan previously had lived in the South Loop and prior to that, for several decades in Hyde Park.

Sagan spent seven decades in Chicago journalism — first through his longstanding ownership of the Hyde Park Herald, which began when he was 24 years old in 1953, and then through his 1958 acquisition of the Southtown Economist group of newspapers, which he sold in 1987 after 30 years of ownership. Al

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