 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2012) |
 | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Founded | 1964 |
| Ceased publication | May 27, 1986 |
The Baltimore News-American was a broadsheet newspaper published in downtown Baltimore, Maryland until May 27, 1986. It had a continuous lineage (in various forms) of more than 200 years. For much of the mid-20th century, it had the largest circulation in the city.
The entity known as the News American was formed by a final merger of two papers, the Baltimore News-Post and The Baltimore Sunday American, in 1964, after a 191-year history and weaning process. Those newspapers each had a long history before the merger, in particular the Baltimore American which could trace its lineage unbroken to at least 1796, and, traditionally, it claimed even earlier antecedents to 1773. Other precursor newspapers The News and the Baltimore Post were founded in 1873 and 1922, respectively, and broke new ground in graphics, technology, journalistic style, and quality of writing and reporting.
For most of the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the buildings of the two main newspapers of the city faced each other across South Street along East Baltimore Street, with The Sun's "Iron Building" of revolutionary cast iron front design reflecting the earliest "skyscraper" construction technique of 1851. Built opposite later in 1873, was The News office/printing establishment featured a mansard roof and a corner clock tower. Longtime owner/editor Charles H. Grasty, who bought the Evening News in 1892, directed the newspaper's coverage of the burgeoning, gritty late-19th Century city, using advanced presses and techniques of graphics, line drawings. and larger headlines in the short days before the advent of printed page photographs.
Competing with "the other paper" across the street, bulletin boards, chalk boards across the second floor front of the building and hawking "newsies" (newspaper delivery boys) with the latest news, telegraphed election results made the intersection the hottest place to be in the Victorian downtown central district.
All this perished in smoke with the "Great Baltimore Fire" of February 1904, which burned out both buildings. Publication was temporarily shifted to other neighboring cities such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Charles and Baltimore Streets, at the geographic center of Baltimore, became the site of a new marble Beaux Arts classical-style publishing offices for The Sun papers for the next 45 years. The corner was nicknamed "Sun Square." The Baltimore American had a towering office skyscraper, the American Building, quickly rebuilt on the same site with a distinctive elaborate green ground floor with gold lettering showing the newspaper's logo and masthead and the dates 1773 and 1904 over the doorways. An additional printing plant several blocks south was located on East Pratt between South and Commerce streets, facing what then was called "The Basin" and its wharves, and today is known as the Inner Harbor. It, too, was built after the 1904 Great Fire, which devastated most of downtown Baltimore.
An additional office building a block north, facing East Lombard Street, was built later in 1924 and supplemented with a more modern printing plant between the two buildings along the South Street side in 1965 after the final merger of the News-Post and the American. The South Street complex was torn down several years after the newspaper's closing in 1986, and remained a parking lot and a source of controversy for Inner Harbor area redevelopment. With the construction of a massive tower initially named Commerce Place on the block between South and Commerce streets in 1991, the intersection and battleground of Baltimore and South Streets (and intersecting North Street [later Guilford Avenue]) are now relatively unknown for the "Newspaper Wars" that ebbed and flowed there through most of the 1800s. The tower was later renamed and made headquarters for the longtime local investment/financial/banking firm Alex. Brown & Sons following its takeover by Germany's Deutsche Bank.
Another casualty of "The Great Fire" was the Baltimore Morning Herald . It had been founded in February 1900 and combined with the Baltimore Evening Herald on August 31, 1904, six months after its headquarters building at the northwestern corner of St. Paul and East Fayette Streets was consumed by the blaze. The massive City Circuit Courthouse (now the Clarence Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse) just to the east across the street, completed four years earlier, was unharmed. The paper's young editor, employed for four years since graduating from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Henry Louis Mencken was displaced from his office and arrangements had to be made to print the paper in another city and ship it back into Baltimore. [1]
Several years later, in June 1906, The Herald was bought out by competitors Grasty and his News joined with Gen. Felix Agnus, owner/publisher of The Baltimore American and the staff, assets and resources divided between the two older papers that were now the largest in the city. Mencken described his early reporting years in the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy Newspaper Days published in 1941. [1]
The Baltimore American, claimed to be a direct descendant of the original Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser was founded in 1773 and had a long-time editor/publisher with C.C. Fulton during the middle 19th Century. After the American Civil War, Felix Agnus, returned from the war and settled in Baltimore and became manager of the American and eventually married the Fulton's daughter. Within a decade, he became the editor and publisher following the death of Fulton. Agnus, who was born in Paris and having earlier served in the Imperial French Army of Napoleon III, was a major with the 165th New York Regiment and late in the war he was breveted a brigadier general in March 1865, and he continued using the title after retiring. He became very active in a variety of civic, social and political affairs of the city, including heading up the Centre Market Commission, which was responsible for rebuilding the Market Place after the devastation caused by the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904. He was also very proud that his new skyscraper for the American was the first to be completed in early 1905 in the "burnt district." He died in October 1925 at 86, several years after selling the paper to a very controversial and often hated man in America.[ citation needed ]
William Randolph Hearst's Hearst Company newspaper empire acquired the morning American from Agnus and the afternoon News from Grasty in 1923 from another newspaper mogul Frank A. Munsey (who also owned the New York Herald , New York Sun , New York Telegraph and Washington Times ). Known as the "Dealer in Dailies" and the "Undertaker of Journalism", Munsey purchased The News in 1908, just two years after the paper had been forced out from its burned-out headquarters across from The Sun into a new skyscraper and publishing tower at the southeast corner of North Calvert Street and East Fayette Street (across from the Battle Monument Square, which had survived untouched on the northern edge of the "Burnt District"). As the first non-resident owner of The American in its already long history, but not satisfied with this new property of The News headquarters, Munsey promptly tore it down just a few years later and rebuilt it in 1911 in larger and grander style as the then briefly tallest building in Baltimore, designed by the famed architectural firms of Baldwin & Pennington of Baltimore and McKim, Mead and White of New York City and named it The Munsey Building, with large ground-floor windows so passers-by could see the massive printing presses which printed the day's papers.[ citation needed ]
Mumsey also became the owner of a new large local bank known as The Munsey Trust Company, founded in 1913 and later reorganized in 1915 into The Equitable Trust Company with Munsey as chairman of the board. It became one of the city and state's largest financial empires into the 1990s. However, by 1924, when The News moved to new offices and printing presses at East Pratt and Commerce Streets facing the waterfront's wharves, the building was again renovated into the bank's headquarters for the next seventy years until another transformation after a series of bank mergers and out-of-town ownership take-overs in the early 2000s made it into apartments and condos. The Scripps-Howard Baltimore Post, a late-comer to the local newspaper scene, founded 1922 was later acquired and merged with The News by the Hearst Company in 1936 to create the Baltimore News-Post under the Hearst banner along with the old ancient The Baltimore American, which was published now only on Sundays.
In 1964, the News-Post and American became published as The News American with a newly designed masthead logo and vignette (sketch). It was the largest circulation daily in Baltimore, especially prominent in the working-class and blue-collar districts until the early 1970s. A series of format changes and staff realignments that alienated many readers under a new editing regime in 1977, along with new problems – delivering an afternoon paper through the after-work day traffic congestion ("drive time") to the outer suburbs, and changing evening leisure habits of the middle classes not allowing much time for paper reading – caused circulation to gradually decline after it had been the largest in the metro area. The paper's last edition was published on May 27, 1986, with the headline: "SO LONG, BALTIMORE", and its demise left The Baltimore Sun (founded 1837, it had just coincidentally been sold several weeks earlier by the longtime family publishers A.S. Abell Company to the national syndicate and newspaper chain Times-Mirror Company of the Los Angeles Times ) as the sole broad-circulation daily in Baltimore, but it was not announced publicly until after the surprise folding of its main competitor.
The stunning news of the multimillion-dollar sale was just announced several days after equally stunning closure of News American, leaving The Sun published in the morning and The Evening Sun (founded 1910) in the afternoon as the only papers left. Separate staffs and content were maintained until the early 1990s when the editions became similar until September 15, 1995, when the evening paper was finally discontinued with a sad banner "GOOD NIGHT, HON" and many of its features and staff combined with the morning paper, which eventually was renamed and publicized as The Baltimore Sun by 2005. [ citation needed ]
In 2000, Times-Mirror Company merged with the Tribune Company of the Chicago Tribune to form a larger syndicate including The Baltimore Sun, which later entered into bankruptcy in 2009 for four years after being acquired by billionaire investor Sam Zell.[ citation needed ]
The revamped News American was published seven days a week with the usually thick special Sunday edition of many sections. The masthead was redesigned with a new vignette with the old Phoenix Shot Tower in the center and the city skyline buildings behind, surmounted by the traditional Hearst stylized eagle. For the first time, the paper was referred to without the city name on the masthead. A new printing presses plant structure was constructed in the center of the block between East Pratt and East Lombard Streets. It joined previous structures facing opposite directions with loading docks on the east side facing Commerce Street and a large brick wall facing the South Street side on the west. A huge anodized aluminum name plate was attached, visible from both streets and passing traffic, next to a new entrance lobby (with exhibits and display boards with history of the newspapers). Entrances on Pratt and Lombard were closed. The paper used a new postal address on South Street.
Hearst Corporation, its wholly owned subsidiary Hearst Holdings Inc., and HHI's wholly owned subsidiary Hearst Communications Inc. (usually referred to simply as Hearst) constitute an American multinational mass media and business information conglomerate based in Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan in New York City.
The New York World-Telegram, later known as the New York World-Telegram and The Sun, was a New York City newspaper from 1931 to 1966.
The Baltimore Sun is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local, regional, national, and international news.
The Great Baltimore Fire raged in Baltimore, Maryland from Sunday February 7 to Monday February 8, 1904. In the fire, more than 1,500 buildings were completely leveled, and some 1,000 severely damaged, bringing property loss from the disaster to an estimated $100 million. 1,231 firefighters helped bring the blaze under control, both professional paid truck and engine companies from the Baltimore City Fire Department (B.C.F.D.) and volunteers from the surrounding counties and outlying towns of Maryland, as well as out-of-state units that arrived on the major railroads. It destroyed much of central Baltimore, including over 1,500 buildings covering an area of some 140 acres (57 ha).
The New York Herald Tribune was a newspaper published between 1924 and 1966. It was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald. It was regarded as a "writer's newspaper" and competed with The New York Times in the daily morning market. The paper won twelve Pulitzer Prizes during its lifetime.
The Sun was a New York newspaper published from 1833 until 1950. It was considered a serious paper, like the city's two more successful broadsheets, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The Sun was the first successful penny daily newspaper in the United States, and was for a time, the most successful newspaper in America.
The Baltimore Morning Herald was a daily newspaper published in Baltimore in the beginning of the 20th century.
Six different newspapers called the Detroit Times have been published in the city of Detroit; the most recent existed for six decades, from 1900 to 1960.
Arunah Shepherdson Abell was an American publisher from New England who was active in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Born in East Providence, Rhode Island, Abell learned the newspaper business as an apprentice at the Providence Patriot. After stints with newspapers in Boston and New York City, he co-founded the Public Ledger in Philadelphia and later independently founded The Sun of Baltimore, Maryland; both were penny papers to appeal to the working class. Abell and his descendants continued ownership of The Sun as a family business until 1910.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the PG, is the largest newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Descended from the Pittsburgh Gazette, established in 1786 as the first newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains, the paper formed under its present title in 1927 from the consolidation of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times and The Pittsburgh Post.
Frank Andrew Munsey was an American newspaper and magazine publisher, banker, political financier and author. He was born in Mercer, Maine, but spent most of his life in New York City. The village of Munsey Park, New York, is named for him, along with The Munsey Building in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, at the southeast corner of North Calvert and East Fayette Streets.
The Athens Banner-Herald is a daily newspaper in Athens, Georgia, USA, and owned by Gannett. The paper has a Sunday special and publishes online under the name Online Athens. It has been through a series of restructurings and mergers since 2000, culminating in its sale, along with several other papers, by Morris Communications to Gatehouse Media in August 2017. Since the merger of GateHouse Media and Gannett in November 2019, The Athens Banner-Herald is now owned by Gannett.
The Gazette, founded in 1727 as The Maryland Gazette, is one of the oldest newspapers in America. Its modern-day descendant, The Capital, was acquired by The Baltimore Sun Media Group in 2014. Previously, it was owned by the Capital Gazette Communications group, which published The Capital, Bowie Blade-News, Crofton-West County Gazette, and Capital Style Magazine.
The Baltimore Examiner was a free daily newspaper in Baltimore, Maryland. It launched in 2006 and ceased publication in 2009.
The Munsey Trust Building was a historic high-rise office building located in Washington, D.C., United States, on E Street, N.W., between 13th and 14th Streets.
The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph was an evening daily newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1927 to 1960. Part of the Hearst newspaper chain, it competed with The Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette until being purchased and absorbed by the latter paper.
The San Francisco Examiner is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and has been published since 1863.
Charles Henry Grasty was a well-known American newspaper operator who at one time controlled The News an afternoon paper begun in 1871 and later The Sun of Baltimore, a morning major daily newspaper, co-founded 1837 by Arunah Shepherdson Abell, William Moseley Swain and recently joined by Grasty with a companion afternoon edition entitled The Evening Sun in 1910. Grasty was named among the great American newspaper publishers and owners, such as James Gordon Bennett, Benjamin Day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Grasty owned the Evening News, which had been founded in the early 1870s and utilized the new illustrative technology of using woodcuts illustrations plates to show pictures spread across its pages before the advent of reprinting photographs directly on newspaper pages. During Grasty's tenure The News built its elaborate tall headquarters and printing plant with a corner clock tower on the southwest corner of East Baltimore and South Streets directly across the street from The Sun's older architectural landmark "Sun Iron Building" of 1851, on the southwest corner, constructed of newly popular cast iron architecture style and supposedly fireproof and an early version of a tall commercial office building that gained increasing popularity in American big cities known as the skyscraper. Grasty ran The News for a number of years greatly increasing its circulation and cultural and civic impact on the city as its leading afternoon paper and later sold it prior to briefly acquiring the Minnesota Dispatch and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the Upper Midwest in separate transactions then later divesting these newspapers to return again to Maryland to seek ownership of The Sun with a syndicate of wealthy backers. Grasty was also one of the developers of the new northern suburban Roland Park community in the early 1890s by the Roland Park Company development firm, said to be an early innovation in community planning, including planned shopping centers and other aspects of the community prior to being offered for sale and development.
The Howard County Times is a weekly newspaper serving Howard County, Maryland, USA.
Felix Agnus was a French-born sculptor, newspaper publisher and soldier who served in the Franco-Austrian War and the American Civil War. Agnus studied sculpture before enlisting to fight in the Franco-Austrian War. Upon the conclusion of the war, he travelled to the United States and again briefly worked as a sculptor. In 1861, upon the outbreak of the American Civil War, Agnus enlisted in the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry, and served with merit, rising to brevet brigadier-general before being mustered out of service. Agnus was then inspector general of the Department of the South and supervised the dismantling of Confederate forts.
