Milwaukee

Newspapers

When Lucius Nieman, who had become managing editor of the Sentinel, decided he wanted a paper of his own, he purchased the three-week-old Daily Journal in 1882. He faced competition from four other English-language dailies, plus four German-and two Polish-language dailies. One indicator of the vibrant competitive newspaper market the city had become is that the Milwaukee Press Club was formed in 1885 (and is now the oldest continuously operating such group in the country). Soon renamed The Milwaukee Journal, in 1891 Nieman's newspaper became the first to use “run-of-paper” color when it printed red and blue stripes across its first page to mark the inauguration of a governor.

The Journal covered a city dominated by an active Socialist Party (which controlled the mayor's office for most years through 1960). Throughout Nieman's long editorship he maintained a generally liberal but independent stance for the newspaper, sometimes supporting Republicans, but more usually Democrats. It won its first Pulitzer in 1919. By this time, most of the foreign-language papers had closed down. Two years after his 1935 death, a small bloc of Journal stock was given to Harvard by his widow; this endowment initiated funding for their Nieman Fellowship program for promising journalists.

Following several owners, the Sentinel was sold to the Hearst Corporation in 1924. Operations were joined to Hearst's afternoon paper, the Wisconsin News, and a joint Sunday edition was published as the Sunday Telegram. The News closed in 1939, leaving the morning market to the Sentinel.

In 1937, Journal Company president Harry Grant assured a stable future for the firm he had [Page 905]just taken over by creating an employee-ownership plan. Employees purchased a one-quarter interest in the company (a proportion that expanded over the years to come). Any sale of the publisher would require approval from two-thirds of the stock voted by active employees (those who retired had to sell their stock back to the employee pool). The rules also allowed any who opposed a buyout the first right to buy the stock of those seeking the sale—and at a “formula” price, not that offered by the buyer. (As Journal Co. stock was not then publicly traded, it was priced according to a formula that took account of company assets and earnings over the previous five years.) Grant's descendants still owned 10 percent of the company 70 years later.

The Journal demonstrated considerable independence in the early 1950s when it opposed Wisconsin's red-baiting junior senator, Joseph McCarthy, though he enjoyed considerable support across the state. Following a long and costly strike, in 1962 Hearst announced the closing of the Sentinel, which had lost money for years. The Journal Company, then at the peak of its circulation (about 400,000 weekdays and half again more on Sundays) and concerned about how its dominance of the Milwaukee media market might look to policymakers, agreed to buy the Sentinel name and subscription list, with Hearst retaining ownership of its broadcast stations (WISN-TV remains with Hearst-Argyle, while the radio station by the early 2000s was owned by Clear Channel). The Sentinel became a Monday-through-Saturday paper, leaving the Sunday market to the parent Milwaukee Journal.

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