The Advocate is Louisiana's largest daily newspaper. Based in Baton Rouge, it serves the southern portion of the state. Separate editions for New Orleans, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, and for Acadiana, The Acadiana Advocate, are published. It also publishes gambit, about New Orleans food, culture, events, and news, and weekly entertainment magazines: Red in Baton Rouge and Lafayette, and Beaucoup in New Orleans.
The oldest ancestor of the modern paper was the Democratic Advocate, an anti-Whig, pro-Democratperiodical established in 1842.[2][3]
Another newspaper, the Louisiana Capitolian, was established in 1868 and soon merged with the then-named Weekly Advocate. By 1889 the paper was being published daily. In 1904, a new owner, William Hamilton, renamed it The Baton Rouge Times and later The State-Times, a paper with emphasis on local news.[2]
In 1909, The State-Times was acquired by Capital City Press, a company newly founded by Charles P. Manship Sr. and James Edmonds. Manship purchased his partner's interest in 1912. In 1925, he also began publishing The Morning Advocate to focus on national news. The Manship family[4][5] went on to become an influential force in Baton Rouge, later adding radio station WJBO in 1932 (moving it to Baton Rouge in 1934) and television station WBRZ-TV in 1955.[4][6]
The State-Times, an afternoon publication, ceased in October 1991. The Advocate remains the sole descendant of the original 1842 paper. The Manship family's Capital City Press company continued to own and operate The Advocate until 2013.
Handing out free copies of the New Orleans edition in the New Orleans Central Business District, October 2012
On October 1, 2012, under the Manships, The Advocate began printing and distributing a daily New Orleans edition. This was due to a perceived gap in the market[7] that materialized when New Orleans' longtime daily paper, The Times-Picayune, announced it would cut back its print publication to only three days a week.[8][9]
In March 2013, New Orleans businessman John Georges signed a letter of intent to purchase The Advocate.[10] Georges and his wife Dathel bought the newspaper through a holding company, Georges Media, on April 30, 2013.[11] The newspaper's circulation in 2013 was 98,000 (daily) and 125,000 (Sunday) as a result of its entry into and 20,000 subscriptions in the New Orleans market.[citation needed][needs update]
The Advocate relaunched its New Orleans edition August 18, 2013, as The New Orleans Advocate and later added The Acadiana Advocate, a third edition serving Lafayette and the Acadiana region.[12]
On April 9, 2018, the holding company for The New Orleans Advocate purchased the New Orleans weekly Gambit and bestofneworleans.com.[13][14]
In 2019, The Advocate won its first Pulitzer Prize, in the Local Reporting category, "For a damning portrayal of the state’s discriminatory conviction system, including a Jim Crow-era law, that enabled Louisiana courts to send defendants to jail without jury consensus on the accused’s guilt."[15]The Advocate's reporting highlighted how the state's non-unanimous jury law—one of only two in the country, with the other being in Oregon[16]—contributed to racial disparities in incarceration and sentencing.[17] Due in part to a voter-education campaign based on The Advocate's reporting, Louisiana voters approved an amendment to the state constitution requiring unanimous jury verdicts on November 6, 2018.[18][19][20]
In May 2019, The Advocate announced that the Georges had purchased its New Orleans competitor, The Times-Picayune, and planned to merge the two papers and their websites into a new newspaper in June 2019.[21][22] Like The Advocate, the combined newspaper will publish a print edition seven days a week.[21][22]The Advocate's Baton Rouge and Lafayette editions were unaffected. The merged paper, carrying the nameplates of both The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate, began publication on July 1.[23]
Notable people
David William Thomas
Advocate main office in Baton Rouge, 2012
In 2007, the newspaper lost three of its key staff with the deaths of Capitol Bureau Chief John LaPlante, health reporter and author of "The Patient Person" columns Laurie Smith Anderson and environmental writer Michael P. Dunne. LaPlante died in Texas in a drowning accident, and Anderson and Dunne succumbed to cancer.[24]
In 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Handelsman returned to Louisiana to join The Advocate as a cartoonist and animator, and columnist James Gill moved to The Advocate from the Times-Picayune.[citation needed]
Related Research Articles
The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate is an American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ancestral publications of other names date back to January 25, 1837. The current publication is the result of the 2019 acquisition of The Times-Picayune by the New Orleans edition of The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
WJBO is a commercial AM radio station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, calling itself "WJBO Newsradio 1150 AM & 98.7 FM." It carries a news/talk format and is owned by iHeartMedia, Inc. The studios are on Hilton Avenue, east of downtown Baton Rouge.
WBRZ-TV is a television station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, affiliated with ABC. The station is owned by the Manship family, who formerly published the Baton Rouge daily newspaper, The Advocate, and is one of a handful of TV stations today to have locally based ownership. WBRZ-TV is sister to Class A This TV affiliate KBTR-CD, and the two stations share studios on Highland Road in Baton Rouge, just south of downtown. WBRZ-TV's transmitter is located in the Sunshine neighborhood of St. Gabriel, Louisiana.
WVLA-TV is a television station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by White Knight Broadcasting, which maintains joint sales and shared services agreements (JSA/SSA) with Nexstar Media Group, owner of Fox affiliate WGMB-TV, CW owned-and-operated station WBRL-CD and independent station KZUP-CD, for the provision of certain services. The stations share studios on Perkins Road in Baton Rouge, while WVLA-TV's transmitter is located near Addis, Louisiana.
KBTR-CD is a low-power Class A television station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, affiliated with This TV. It is owned by Louisiana Television Broadcasting alongside ABC affiliate WBRZ-TV. Both stations share studios on Highland Road in Baton Rouge, where KBTR-CD's transmitter is also located.
Le Petit Théâtre Du Vieux Carré is a small professional theatre in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Gambit is a New Orleans, Louisiana-based free alternative weekly newspaper established in 1981.
John Georges is an American businessman from New Orleans, who owns Louisiana's two largest newspapers and online news sites. He formerly served on the Louisiana Board of Regents, the body which supervises higher education in his native state. In 2007, he ran for governor as an independent. He received 186,000 votes and procured a plurality in Orleans Parish. In 2010, he sought the office of mayor of New Orleans as a Democrat; he finished a distant third behind two other Democrats.
Rouses Markets are a chain of grocery supermarkets in the U.S. states of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi with more than 6,500 employees.
The media of New Orleans serve a large population in the New Orleans area as well as southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi.
KHMA-TV, VHF analog channel 11, was a short-lived independent television station licensed to Houma, Louisiana, United States that served the south Louisiana community.
The 2015 Louisiana gubernatorial election was held on November 21, 2015, to elect the governor of Louisiana. Incumbent Republican Governor Bobby Jindal was not eligible to run for re-election to a third term because of term limits established by the Louisiana Constitution.
Zachary "Zack" Sawyer Kopplin is an American political activist, journalist, and television personality from Louisiana. Kopplin has campaigned to keep creationism out of public school science classrooms and been involved with other separation of church and state causes. He has opposed school vouchers because they provide public money to schools which may teach creationism. As a high school student, he organized seventy-eight Nobel laureate scientists in a campaign against the Louisiana Science Education Act, a creationism law. He is also involved with science funding policy and curriculum and textbook policy. His new campaign calls for a launching Second Giant Leap for Humankind, calling for Barack Obama to invest $1 trillion in research and education.
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Dan Claitor is an American politician. He served as a Republican member for the 16th district of the Louisiana State Senate.
New Orleans–Baton Rouge passenger rail is a proposed inter-city passenger train service between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the I-10 corridor in the U.S. state of Louisiana. The route would connect the state's largest city to its second-largest city and state capital with trains as fast as 90 mph (140 km/h).
References
↑ "The Advocate". Louisiana Press Association. Retrieved 2023-04-24.
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