The Morning Call

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The Morning Call
The July 27, 2005 front page of The Morning Call
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	Tribune Company
Publisher	Timothy R. Kennedy
Editor	Ardith Hilliard
Founded	1883 (as the Critic)
Headquarters	101 North 6th Street Allentown, PA 18105 United States
Website: mcall.com

The Morning Call is a daily newspaper based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the United States.

The Critic, an Allentown newspaper founded in 1883, was the direct ancestor of The Morning Call. The editor, owner and chief reporter of the Critic was Samuel S. Woolever.

In 1894 Muhlenberg College senior David A. Miller went to work for the Critic as its sole reporter. Its owners at that point were Charles Weiser, editor, and Kirt W. DeBelle, business manager. Later that year the newspaper ran a contest. A school boy or girl in Lehigh County would receive $5 in gold if he or she could guess the publication's new name. The identity of the lucky winner is lost to history, but on Jan. 1, 1895, Allentown City Treasurer A.L. Reichenbach, who had supervised the contest, read out the new name: The Morning Call.

That same year, David A. Miller and his brother Samuel Miller were able to purchase their first shares of The Morning Call. It was the start of a series of stock buyouts that would leave the newspaper entirely in the hands of the Miller brothers by 1904. In that nine-year period, the Miller brothers worked to gather subscribers. In one case, David A. Miller even attended a corn husking party and had every family there signed up by the time he left.

In 1906 The Morning Call was invited to join the Associated Press.

As it did so, subscriptions continued to mount. By 1920, World War I and hard work by the Millers had raised circulation to 20,000. A series of newspaper mergers that year, funded by Gen. Harry C Trexler, led to the Millers' sale of The Morning Call to the Trexler interests. It was only after Trexler's death in 1933, and at the urging of David A. Miller's sons, Donald P. and Samuel W., that David A. Miller returned to the newspaper in 1934. In 1935 The Morning Call acquired the sole remaining Allentown newspaper, The Chronicle and News, and renamed it the Evening Chronicle. In 1938 the Sunday Call-Chronicle was first published.

In 1951, David A. Miller assumed the official title of president of the Call-Chronicle newspapers. He would keep that post until his death in 1958 at the age of 88. That September his sons, Donald and Samuel, were named publishers. After Samuel's death in 1967, Donald P. Miller continued to run the newspaper. He did so with his son, Edward D. Miller, until the late 1970s when Edward became executive editor and publisher.

The Evening Chronicle went to press for the last time in 1980. In 1981 Edward D. Miller left the newspaper, and Donald P. Miller returned as chairman. The publisher and chief executive officer was Bernard C. Stinner. They retained control of the newspaper until 1984, when it was sold to The Times Mirror Company, joining the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant and Southern Connecticut Newspapers Inc., publishers of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Times. Gary K. Shorts was publisher and chief executive officer from 1987 until suceeded by Guy Gilmore in 2000. Susan Hunt was named publisher and CEO in June 2001.

In Septempter 1996, The Morning Call launched mcall.com on the Internet.

In 2000, Times Mirror was acquired by the Tribune Company, merging 11 newspapers, 22 television stations, four radio stations, a cable TV company, and Tribune Interactive. As a unit of Tribune, The Morning Call's newspaper siblings add The Chicago Tribune, Daily Press in Hampton Roads VA, Orlando Sentinel, and South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Owned by the Tribune Company, The Morning Call covers Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley region, the third most populous metropolitan region in the state.

The Morning Call's daily circulation is 110,000, placing it among the top 100 daily circulation newspapers in the nation.

[edit] External links

• The Morning Call Official Web Site.
• History of The Morning Call from its official Web Site.