The Charleston Gazette
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Charleston Gazette | |
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 The July 27, 2005 front page of The Charleston Gazette |
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
| Format | Broadsheet |
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| Owner | The Daily Gazette Company |
| Publisher | Elizabeth Chilton |
| Editor | James A. Haught |
| Founded | 1873 |
| Headquarters | 1001 Virginia St. E. Charleston, WV 25301 United States |
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| Website: wvgazette.com | |
The Charleston Gazette is a newspaper in West Virginia. It is published Monday through Friday mornings. On Saturday and Sunday mornings the combined Gazette-Mail is published, however it is produced by the Gazette.
The Gazette was established in 1873. At the time, it was a weekly newspaper known as the Kanawha Chronicle. It had a couple of other owners and names -- The Kanawha Gazette and the Daily Gazette -- before its name was officially changed to The Charleston Gazette in 1907.
The Chilton family acquired formal interest in the paper in 1912. William E. Chilton, a U.S. senator, was publisher of the Gazette, as were his son, William E. Chilton II, and grandson, W. E. "Ned" Chilton III, (Yale Graduate and classmate/protegé of conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr.)
In 1918 a fire destroyed the Gazette building at 909 Virginia St. The newspaper was moved to 227 Hale St., where it remained for 42 years.
Under a consolidation agreement with the Charleston Daily Mail, the Gazette moved in 1960 into an addition of the Daily Mail Building at 1001 Virginia St. E. This led to a newspaper Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) in the U.S. and resulted in an investigation by the U. S. Department of Justice to ensure propriety in the transaction, the core of which included the money-saving use by both papers of the modern IBM computer-driven typesetting and composition systems, also a national first. The company is known today as Charleston Newspapers.
A year later, following the death of Robert L. Smith, W.E. "Ned" Chilton III was named publisher of the Gazette. He served in that position until his death in 1987. During that time he earned a well-deserved reputation as a "firebrand liberal." Ned Chilton used to say that the job of a newspaper was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." However, in 1965, the newspaper fired all of its blue collar workers for joining a labor union. It remains non-union.
Former West Virginia Governor Arch A. Moore, Jr., a staunch Republican who both won and lost an election to John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV, derisively renamed The Charleston Gazette "The Morning Sick Call." This was in reference to The Gazette's reporting of various graft and corruption allegations in Governor Moore's administrations. (Moore was later convicted by the Republican United States Attorney of income tax evasion, perjury, election fraud and taking more than $500,000 from a coal operator for state favors).
Ned Chilton's widow, Elizabeth Early "Betty" Chilton, is now president of the Daily Gazette Co. and publisher of the Charleston Gazette. It is still a family-owned newspaper, one of the few independents still operating. The paper's editor, prize-winning journalist James A. Haught, has been with the paper for more than 50 years.
The paper has won numerous awards and received significant national recognition for a newspaper of its size. Recent efforts that have received such recognition include a series of stories that resulted in the resignation and criminal conviction of the state House of Delegates education chairman, a series on the environmental effects of mountaintop removal coal mining, a series on the state's failed attempts to deal with its residents suffering from mental illness, and a series on the deaths nationwide from the widespread use of methadone.
The Gazette's editorial page is usually left-of-center. It was one of the few (and perhaps the only) daily newspaper in West Virginia not to endorse George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
The final Sunday issue of the year picks a "West Virginian of the Year" on a similar basis to the Time Magazine "Man (or Woman) of the Year."
In May 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the owners of The Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail, alleging that the joint operating agreement between the two violates antitrust laws. The Justice Department said the JOA lost its antitrust protection in 2004, when the Daily Gazette Co. bought the controlling interest from MediaNews, the company that owned the Daily Mail. MediaNews is paid a fee to manage the editorial operations of the Daily Mail.
In their response to the lawsuit, the owners of the Gazette and Daily Mail asked that the lawsuit be dismissed. They noted that both Charleston newspapers remain editorially independent. They also noted that never before has the Justice Department sued the newspapers in an ongoing JOA.
