Houston

Print Media

Houston was served for more than a century by two dailies, the Post and the Chronicle, although [Page 726]several dailies, most notably Scripps Howard's colorful and feisty Press, came and went. The Press stopped publishing in 1964, when its assets were acquired by the Chronicle.

The Post was published from 1880 to 1883, and then reappeared in 1885. It was purchased by William P. Hobby in 1939 and became the only Houston newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize. It was sold in 1983 to the Toronto Sun and again four years later to Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. The competition for readers and advertisers was strong during the 1980s and early 1990s. The Post and Chronicle competed aggressively for news, according to journalists at both papers, and both became more interesting and contemporary in appearance. Singleton sold the newspaper's assets in 1995 to the Hearst Corporation, already publisher of the Chronicle, and Houston became a one-daily town. Competition for news was greatly diminished following the Post's demise. Some critics blamed the Sun's stewardship and Singleton for running the Post into the ground, while others said if they gave the Post a dozen years, it would not have been otherwise.

The Houston Chronicle was born in 1901 when news reporter Marcellus E. Foster combined his own $5,000 with another $20,000 from investors to start the paper. Jesse H. Jones bought a share of the paper in 1908 and became the Chronicle's sole owner in 1926. Jones left the paper to the Houston Endowment when he died in 1956. Hearst purchased the Chronicle in 1987.

Unlike many of America's biggest dailies, the Chronicle has never won a Pulitzer Prize. The newspaper flubbed perhaps its best opportunity when Enron, a global firm based in Houston and America's seventh largest company at the time, went belly-up. The Chronicle missed “a lot of red flags” signaling that Enron was in trouble, then managing editor Tommy Miller told the Columbia Journalism Review.

Chronicle management, probably under pressure from Hearst, has tried in recent years to maximize profit at the expense of quality journalism. Editors have published increasing numbers of soft features, sports stories, and promotions on a front page that once contained only hard news, and the editorial page has drastically reduced the space for op-ed contributions by non-syndicated writers.

Space for news in Section A, the Chronicle's primary news section, also has been shrinking. The Chronicle devoted 106 pages in the third week (weekdays and Saturday) of November 2007 to Section A, compared to 124 pages during the same period just two years earlier. An average of three more pages were published each day during that 2005 week, and the percentage of space devoted to news in Section A pages did not expand appreciably in 2007.

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