Mullen, Shaun D.

Newspaper journalist and blogger Shaun D. Mullen was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on March 14, 1947. His 20-year career at the Philadelphia Daily News (1981-2001) included work as night city editor and special projects editor, with numerous investigative reporting assignments, features, and special columns. He created a weblog, Kiko's House, in 2005.

Shaun D. Mullen was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on March 14, 1947. He was graduated from John Dickinson High School and pursued lifelong interests in journalism and writing, which had been cemented during a summer institute at the Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. Mullen attended the University of Delaware, where he served as editor-in-chief of the school paper, The Review, during the socially, politically, and culturally momentous years of 1967-1969. He went to work for the Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal after leaving the University but he was drafted into the Army in August 1969. Mullen eventually was stationed in Tokyo, Japan, where he worked for Pacific Stars & Stripes . After his Army discharge and a freelance career in the Far East, Mullen returned to the News Journal in 1973 as deputy city editor.

Mullen was hired as night city editor of the Philadelphia Daily News in 1981 and in the course of his 20-year career there also worked as special projects editor on investigative projects. He also worked as an editorial writer and as a reporter who covered, among other stories, the O.J. Simpson murders, criminal and civil trials, and the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. In 1987, Mullen supervised "The Six Hundred and Thirty," a special Daily News section with biographies of the 630 Philadelphians (all men) who died or went missing in Vietnam. (The number of identified dead and missing has since increased.) The 630 stories were collected in time for the city's dedication of a Vietnam War Memorial at Penn's Landing in 1987. From January 2000-2001, Mullen wrote a five-day-a-week column--from the perspective of a 120-year-old "lost soul"--under the pen name of Millennium Man, in which he recounted historic 20th-century events in Philadelphia, the U.S., and abroad.

Mullen took up blogging in 2005. He blogs at Kiko's House and The Moderate Voice. He has edited several books and is the author of The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder, a non-fiction account of an unsolved murder published in 2010; Brothers at Arms, an oral history of identical twin Korean War veterans published in 2012, and There's a House in the Land, a tale of the 1970s to be published in 2012.

Biographical information derived from the collection. (See Box 1, Folder 1.)

From the guide to the Shaun D. Mullen journalism papers, 1964-2012, 1993-2011, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)