For more than five decades, the politicians, aides, and lobbyists who worked Pennsylvania's Capitol learned to read John Baer's column before they read anything else. Baer, the Harrisburg-based political journalist whose reporting ran from the Nixon administration nearly to the present day, died September 24, 2026, at his home in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, at age 79.

Baer grew up in Harrisburg, where his father worked as a political reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot, and spent three years teaching high school English before turning to journalism himself. He joined the Harrisburg Evening News as a reporter in 1972, then, after a Congressional fellowship in Washington, moved in 1978 to WITF, the city's public broadcaster, where he wrote and produced public affairs programs, including a documentary on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. He later earned a master's degree from Temple University, after undergraduate study at Mount St. Mary's University, and worked on Bill Scranton's 1986 campaign for governor before returning full time to newspapers.

In 1987, Baer joined the Philadelphia Daily News as a Harrisburg-based political reporter. Editor Zack Stalberg later persuaded him to become a columnist, a role he filled for the paper and its sister publication, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which credits him with writing about the state's politics and government continuously from that year, for the next 32 years. In 2002, the National Journal named him one of the ten leading political journalists working outside Washington, D.C. He drew on that Harrisburg reporting for his 2012 book, On the Front Lines of Pennsylvania Politics, published by Arcadia Publishing's The History Press imprint.

When his run at the Daily News ended in 2019, Baer kept writing, moving his column to the Harrisburg Patriot-News and PennLive, where he continued covering the same Capitol beat he had first covered in 1972, a throughline documented in an oral history recorded by Penn State's Bellisario College of Communications. The Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association gave him its Ben Franklin Award of Excellence in 2015, and the Pennsylvania Bar Association gave him first place in its media awards for commentary on law and justice issues in 2018. In 2024, as the NewsMedia Association marked its hundredth anniversary with a class of one hundred honorees in Hershey, Baer was inducted into its Hall of Fame. He kept filing columns for PennLive into 2026, until shortly before his death.

He was married to Rosemary Baer for 57 years. Baer is survived by Rosemary, sons Johnny and James Baer, daughter-in-law Melissa Baer, and three grandchildren, Aiden, Owen, and Emma. For years the couple hosted a well-attended Christmas reception at their New Cumberland home, a gathering that mixed the overlapping worlds of Harrisburg politics and journalism he had spent his career covering.

Baer's column outlived the era of typewriters and afternoon papers it started in, carrying his coverage of Pennsylvania politics from the Harrisburg Evening News newsroom of 1972 into PennLive's website more than fifty years later, without ever losing its focus on the corridors of the Capitol. The book he wrote about that beat remains a record of a quarter century of Harrisburg politics that most readers only glimpsed in daily installments. What remains in New Cumberland is plainer than any award: a wife of 57 years, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren, family who knew him long before the rest of the state learned to read him first every morning.