Franklin assumed the Louis A. Weil Jr. Endowed Chair in January. In this role, Franklin also is the director of Indiana University’s new National Sports Journalism Center.

Before his appointment at I.U., Franklin was the editor and senior vice president of The Baltimore Sun, Maryland's largest news organization, for five years.

During Franklin's tenure, The Sun won numerous national journalism awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting in 2007. The Sun’s national awards under his leadership included: the prestigious Polk Award, two national Society of Professional Journalists Awards, two National Headliner Awards, the Loeb Award, the Mike Berger Award and the top print journalism award in Tribune Co. The Sun was named the “Newspaper of the Year” three straight years by the Maryland/Delaware/D.C. Press Association. In 2008, Franklin was named one of Maryland’s most influential leaders.

Before joining The Sun, Franklin was the editor and vice president of the Orlando Sentinel for three years. During that time, the Sentinel won more than two dozen national journalism awards, including the Polk Award for environmental reporting, the Scripps Howard Distinguished Service to the First Amendment Award for its investigation into NASCAR racing safety, the National Journalism Award for literacy form the Scripps Howard Foundation, a national Society of Professional Journalist Award for non-deadline reporting, and a National Headliner Award for investigative reporting in collaboration with The Sun. In 2003, the Sentinel won the highest journalism honor from the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors for its coverage of the Columbia space shuttle tragedy.

Franklin's first top editor job was at his home state newspaper, The Indianapolis Star, a paper he led in 2000. In his year there, The Star won a national Polk Award for state reporting for an investigation into Indiana's "shockingly inadequate oversight" of its mentally ill patients.

Previously, Franklin spent 17 years as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune. His reporting assignments included Cook County government, Chicago City Hall and the Illinois Statehouse. He then rose through the editing ranks from assistant city editor to associate managing editor. Under Franklin’s leadership in the mid 1990s, the Tribune’s sports section was named among the 10 best in the nation.

Franklin has been active in First Amendment and freedom of information issues. He took the leading role in organizing the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors' first "Sunshine Sunday" public awareness campaign for open government in 2002. That effort was honored with the Society of Professional Journalists "Sunshine Award," and his efforts also were recognized by the First Amendment Foundation. That initial "Sunshine Sunday" effort in Florida has blossomed into a national public awareness campaign by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

In 1981, he won the Society of Professional Journalists' Barney Kilgore Award as the top college journalism student in the nation.