Akron Beacon Journal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Akron Beacon Journal traces its roots to 1839, when a predecessor paper called the Summit Beacon first rolled off the presses in Akron, Ohio. That makes it Summit County's oldest continuously operating business. Over the decades it has changed hands several times, moved its printing operations, and shrunk its staff. Yet it has also won four Pulitzer Prizes, a record that places it among the most decorated regional newspapers in the United States. How did a single daily paper in a mid-sized Ohio city become the flagship of a national newspaper chain? How did it earn those prizes, and who were the journalists who defined its character? The answers live in the paper's long, sometimes turbulent history.

• 2. Founding and the Knight Era

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  The paper as readers know it today was born from a 1897 merger between the Summit Beacon and the Akron Evening Journal, which had only been founded the year before, in 1896. The combined publication took the name Beacon Journal. Six years later, in 1903, a businessman named Charles Landon Knight purchased it. Knight's acquisition set the paper on a path far beyond northeastern Ohio. When Charles died in 1933, his son John S. Knight inherited the Beacon Journal. John Knight treated it not merely as a local paper but as the cornerstone of an expanding operation. Under his stewardship it became the original and flagship newspaper of what grew into Knight Newspaper Company, later rebranded as Knight Ridder, one of the largest newspaper groups in the country.

• 3. Four Pulitzers

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  John S. Knight himself won the first of the paper's four Pulitzer Prizes, the 1968 Prize for Editorial Writing, for his weekly notebook columns about the Vietnam War. Three years later, in 1971, the Beacon Journal won the Pulitzer for General Local Reporting for its coverage of the Kent State Shootings. That coverage put the paper at the center of one of the defining moments in American postwar history. The 1987 Prize for General News Reporting came for a series on a potential corporate takeover, a story the staff called "The Goodyear War." The fourth and most recent prize arrived in 1994, the Pulitzer for Public Service, awarded for a race relations series titled "A Question of Color." Four prizes across four distinct categories reflect the range of journalism the newsroom has produced.

• 4. Notable Voices

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  Herman Fetzer, better known by his pen name Jake Falstaff, worked as a suburban reporter for the Akron Times before moving to the Beacon Journal. He launched his column Pippins and Cheese in 1920, borrowing both the title and his pseudonym from William Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. At the Beacon Journal, his desk sat next to that of Josephine Van De Grift, who wrote the daily columns Demi-Tasse and Mrs. Grundy and also worked with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, making her one of the paper's more prominent early 20th-century voices. Sports coverage brought its own distinguished figures. Sheldon Ocker spent years covering the Cleveland Indians for the Beacon Journal, and in 2018 received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, which inducted him into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Terry Pluto earned recognition as the NSSA Ohio Sportswriter of the Year on multiple occasions and wrote more than 20 books, most of them about Northeast Ohio sports.

• 5. Ownership Shifts and Printing Changes

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  Knight Ridder, the company the Beacon Journal had helped build, was sold to the McClatchy Company in June 2006. McClatchy immediately signaled it intended to divest a dozen of the acquired papers, and the Beacon Journal was among them. On the 2nd of August 2006, McClatchy sold the paper to Black Press. In 2018, GateHouse Media acquired it. The ownership shuffles coincided with operational changes on the production side. On the 11th of November 2013, the Akron Beacon Journal printed its last edition in-house. After that date it relied on the presses at The Repository in Canton, Ohio, which was also owned by GateHouse, and later moved its print production to The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Today the paper remains the sole daily newspaper in Akron and is distributed throughout Northeast Ohio under the ownership of Gannett, which acquired GateHouse.