Tulsa World For 100 Years
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa World, the family-owned daily newspaper serving northeastern Oklahoma. Tulsa has become unusual among the nation’s major cities in that its daily newspaper remains locally-owned.
Two huge trends of the final third of the last century transformed the look of newspaper ownership. Starting with Dow Jones in 1967 and in gradual succession through the mid-1990s, more than a dozen newspaper companies went from private to public ownership. In turn, they used much of their Wall Street proceeds to finance a tidal wave of acquisitions and mergers, resulting in local ownership becoming a rarity.
Among the biggest chain owners in the industry and examples of papers they control are Advance, operating 26 dailies, including the Star-Ledger of Newark, the Plain Dealer of Cleveland and the Oregonian of Portland; Hearst with seven dailies, including the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News; Atlanta-based Cox Newspapers, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the flagship, and including among its 17 papers, the Austin American-Statesman, the Palm Beach Post and the Dayton Daily News; Freedom Communications, consisting of the Orange County Register and 27 smaller papers; Morris Communications, a chain of 27 mid-sized and small papers, mostly in the South, including the Savannah Morning News; and Copley Press, consisting of the San Diego Union-Tribune and eight smaller papers.
In addition, once locally-owned papers such as the Denver Post, Detroit Free Press and daily papers in cities such as Honolulu, Boise, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Rochester and Seattle are owned by national companies.
Tulsa has lost many great companies over the years, but not the Tulsa World. Thank you, Lorton family, for hanging in there. Keep those presses running!
Updated 08-19-2005
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