Joe Fahy, a soft-spoken, dogged journalist who pried essential information from one of the trickiest of beats, died yesterday after a two-year battle with lung cancer. He was 54.

Mr. Fahy, a resident of Bellevue who covered medicine at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and previously at The Indianapolis Star, died at Forbes Hospice shortly after he was moved there from UPMC Montefiore, where he had been treated for an infection and organ failure after his cancer spread.

Yesterday, colleagues gathered in the newspaper's city room for an emotional farewell at which he was praised as an unfailingly peaceable soul capable of assembling complex, sometimes controversial, stories without a trace of rancor.

At The Star, he shared in a 2000 George Polk Award for an investigation into Indiana's system of care for the mentally retarded.

"In more than three decades of newspapering I never knew anyone who loved his craft more, who took more succor from his colleagues, or anyone for whom it was more instinctive to make gentle the life of this world," said David Shribman, Post-Gazette executive editor.

Mr. Fahy never smoked but was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. He immediately began an aggressive round of chemotherapy and returned to the office within weeks. Three months ago, he led a Post-Gazette delegation in the annual walk to raise money to fight Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He organized the group on behalf of a Post-Gazette colleague living with the disease. In August he ran a half-marathon.

Mr. Fahy's colleagues organized a prayer group on his behalf. His treatment began with a session of prayers and laying on of hands in a side office at the paper. In his final days, colleagues prayed at his bedside. One sang.

"He was solid. What he wrote was solid. He was solid as a person," said reporter Don Hopey, who shared desk space with Mr. Fahy at the Post-Gazette.

Mr. Hopey, a self-described religious doubter, found himself at Mr. Fahy's bedside reading Psalms.

To the moment his cancer overwhelmed him, Mr. Fahy continued to work on a project chronicling the history and closing of Mayview State Hospital, a story scheduled to appear Sunday.

His partner in the project, photographer Steve Mellon, said Mr. Fahy never gave any hint of giving up on the story and spoke of it to the end as a project he wanted to complete.

"His determination to see that story through was pretty remarkable for a person as ill as he was," Mr. Mellon said. "In that way, he was a consummate professional.

"He is a man of great faith. He would hold my hand and say 'I know that God's will is going to be done here.' He didn't look at me and say 'God's got to heal me.' He never asked anything for himself."

A meticulous craftsman, Mr. Fahy's attention to detail once took one of the paper's most formidable editors by surprise. Jon Schmitz, a news editor known for catching the most elusive of errors, spotted what he thought was a misspelling of a doctor's name in a story Mr. Fahy wrote, because it was different from the spelling in the hospital's news release.

"When I called him just to be sure, he told me he'd checked it himself, and it was the news release that was wrong," Mr. Schmitz said.

Mr. Fahy once wrote that he regarded his 1981 acceptance of Christ as his personal savior as the pivotal event in his life. He was a member of Allegheny Center Alliance Church, North Side.

Born March 15, 1954, in Oldenburg, Ind., Joseph William Fahy Jr. was adopted as an infant by Joseph W. Fahy, a landscape foreman for the Indianapolis Public Schools, and Ruth Pedigo Fahy, a homemaker who later worked as an office manager and personnel manager.

He graduated from Cathedral High School in 1971 and received a bachelor's degree in English five years later from the University of Notre Dame. The following year, his first published work, "Thomas Pynchon's 'V' and Mythology," appeared in the journal Critique: Studies of Modern Fiction.

After a stint as a high school English teacher in southeastern Virginia, where his wife served in the Navy, he was hired in 1982 as a circulation manager for The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk. He began freelancing for the newspaper and its sister publication, The Ledger-Star, and was hired as a staff writer in 1983.

At the Norfolk papers he worked as a police reporter, then as North Carolina correspondent, before joining The Indianapolis News in 1995 as its diversity reporter, covering issues related to gender fairness, racial and ethnic diversity and the needs of minority groups.

At The Star, he also gained attention by co-writing a pair of investigative series uncovering problems with Indiana nursing homes. The reports resulted in state policy changes in the oversight of those businesses.

Mr. Fahy broke the story revealing the connection between an Indiana University oncologist and Dr. Jerri Nielsen, a physician stationed at the South Pole who found herself stranded after discovering she had breast cancer. His reports showed how specialists at the center guided Dr. Nielsen's care for months through e-mail messages and videoconferences before she could be rescued.

A year later, teamed with reporter Kevin Corcoran, Mr. Fahy revealed how the state of Indiana failed to intervene as 108 residents were moved from state institutions to a privately run group of homes without sufficient planning. Nine residents died over a two-year period. The report prompted the ouster or demotions of the state's top human service officials and won The Star a Polk Award, one of journalism's most prestigious honors.

The year Mr. Fahy won the Polk Award, he left journalism to become planning director for a local nonprofit, the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, where he drafted an acclaimed 10-year plan to end homelessness in Indianapolis.

In 2004 he joined the staff of the Post-Gazette. While there he captured several state and national awards for his work, including a Clarion Award as part of a two-man project explaining Medicare Part D the year it was introduced.

Mr. Fahy married the former Mary Beth Sprague in 1974. They were divorced in 1983.

He is survived by two sons, Joseph Fahy III of Pittsburgh and John Fahy of Nanuet, N.Y.; a daughter, Catherine, of Freeport; a sister, Cecilia "Cissy" Bowman, of Plainfield, Ind.; and a grandson, Cairon Fahy of Nanuet.

Friends will be received from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at Beinhauer and Son Co. Funeral Home, 2630 West Liberty Ave., Beechview. A memorial service will be held at the funeral home at 8 p.m. Friday.

A funeral Mass is scheduled for a later date at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, 317 E. 57th St., Indianapolis, followed by burial in St. Malachy Cemetery, Brownsburg, Ind.

The family requests memorial donations to the Hillman Cancer Center, 5115 Centre Ave., Pittsburgh 15232.