A FORMER editor credited with transforming the NT News into a national voice for Territorians and an award-winning journalist have been inducted into a journalism hall of fame.

The two NT News stalwarts, Jim Bowditch and Douglas Lockwood, were inducted into the Australian Hall of Fame on Friday night.

Mr Bowditch was known as a hard-drinking, hard-smoking editor of the paper for 18 years from 1955 and introduced a left-leaning focus to the paper.

He won the Distinguished Conduct Medal fighting with special forces in Borneo in World War 11 and was captured by the Australian egalitarian spirit.

Mr Bowditch won a Walkley Award in 1959 for Best Provincial Newspaper Story.

In 1973, he was sacked by Rupert Murdoch, after a complaint about an obituary and editorial he wrote about Darwin’s richest man, Michael Paspalis.

The article was pulled by the paper’s manager and a new editor was appointed, causing a strike by staff and an industrial arbitration hearing.

Mr Lockwood was a prolific journalist and author who wrote extensively on NT history.

He began his career with the Herald & Weekly Times in 1941 and stayed there until 1968.

He covered the first Japanese attack on Australia in 1942.

In 1954 he broke the news that Evdokia Petrov had sought asylum at Darwin airport and won a Walkley Award in 1958 for his report on a 16-year-old Aboriginal girl who was living in squalor after meeting the Queen Mother in Canberra.

Melbourne Press Club CEO Mark Baker said the Australian Media Hall of Fame demonstrated the importance and public benefit of journalism.

“The achievements of these extraordinary men and women shows the abiding importance of great journalism for our democracy and why we should celebrate and defend it,” he said.