Monday, February 3, 2014

Chicago Newspapers

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/889.html

Chicago's city newspapers grew steadily in the 1840s and 1850s, reaching 11 dailies and 22 weeklies by 1860. Although most pre–Civil War Chicago papers were short-lived, the Chicago Journal (1844), an afternoon Republican paper founded by J. Young Scammon, and the Chicago Times (1854), a morning Democratic paper, survived the war and flourished. The Journal became Democratic and in 1897 acquired Finley Peter Dunne's satirical Mr. Dooley columns, written in Irish dialect.
Chicago Defender Newsboy
The Times was sold in 1861 to Wilbur F. Storey, Chicago's most iconoclastic newspaper editor, who reasserted the paper's unpopular Democratic support for the Civil War. After the war, Storey, using the motto “to print the news and raise hell,” turned the Times into an outspoken, eccentric reporter and critic of Chicago society. Storey edited the Times until his death in 1884; in 1895 the paper merged with the Herald, a daily founded in 1881, and became a Republican voice.
              
The morning Chicago Republican (1865), sporting the motto “Republican in everything, Independent in nothing,” was edited briefly by Charles A. Dana and, in 1872, after passing through several hands, was renamed the Chicago Inter Ocean, an upper-class arbiter of cultural tastes. The Inter Ocean went into decline after 1895, when it became the property of Chicago traction boss Charles T. Yerkes, who used it as a tool in his political wars.