Minneapolis–St. Paul

Newspapers

Minnesota's mass media history began in St. Paul on April 28, 1849, when James Madison Goodhue published the first issue of the Minnesota Pioneer weekly. He had taken the first steamer up the Mississippi as soon as word came from Washington that Congress had established the Minnesota Territory. Statehood was still nine years away.

In January 1851, Goodhue got into a duel over some of his editorials against Whig Party territorial officials; he often accused the “recumbents” of drunkenness, graft, and incompetence. Goodhue used his pistol to wound Joseph Cooper, whose brother David was running for territorial chief justice, but Cooper stabbed him twice with a bowie knife. Blood flowed liberally, but both men survived.

As St. Paul's population grew, Minnesota's first four daily newspapers all began publication in May 1854: the Daily Minnesota Pioneer on May 1, the St. Paul Daily Democrat that same evening, the Daily Minnesotian on May 11 and the St. Paul Daily Times on May 15. A year later, the St. Paul Daily Free Press became the city's fifth daily—even though the telegraph didn't make it to St. Paul until 1860 and the railroad didn't arrive until 1862. The St. Anthony Express weekly had begun publication in 1851 in what was to become Minneapolis, but the younger twin city didn't have a daily newspaper until the Minneapolis Tribune launched on May 25, 1867.

On April 11, 1875, the St. Paul Press took over the Pioneer, giving the city one powerful morning [Page 907]paper. The Pioneer Press' main competition was a Democratic afternoon daily begun in 1868, the St. Paul Dispatch. In 1876, the Minneapolis Tribune suffered the ignominy of being bought by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. But in a matter of months, a dozen prominent Minneapolitans bought back the Tribune to be an evening paper, which became the Minneapolis Journal after they relaunched the morning Minneapolis Tribune in May 1880. In March 1891, William J. Murphy bought the Tribune for $450,000. By 1895, its circulation reached 37,453, while Minneapolis had a population of 200,000, many of whom still read the area's Swedish-, Norwegian-, or German-language newspapers.

In St. Paul, the evening Dispatch's circulation passed the morning Pioneer Press' in 1906, and the Dispatch bought its last St. Paul rival three years later. In 1927, the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch became the first acquisition in what would be a coast-to-coast chain of papers owned by the Ridder brothers: Bernard, Joseph, and Victor. The Ridders would run St. Paul's paper and own at least half of it for the next 80 years.

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