St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• 1. Introduction

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  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was born from a public auction in 1878, when Joseph Pulitzer bid on a bankrupt newspaper and walked away with the foundation of a journalistic institution. He paid for the St. Louis Dispatch, merged it with the St. Louis Evening Post, and printed the first edition on the 12th of December 1878. That first run totaled exactly 4,020 copies, four pages each, under a name that was quickly trimmed to what readers know today. Nearly a century and a half later, the paper has collected 19 Pulitzer Prizes and still anchors the St. Louis metropolitan area as its largest daily by circulation. But the path from those first 4,020 copies to a paper navigating ownership changes, newsroom layoffs, and a new six-day print schedule is anything but straightforward. How did a paper shaped by one family's principles survive decades of upheaval? And what does its founding editor's deadly confrontation in 1882 reveal about the culture that built it?

• 2. Cockerill's Shot

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  John A. Cockerill was the man Pulitzer chose to run the paper as its first managing editor, and Cockerill did not shy from confrontation. In 1882, a congressional race between James Overton Broadhead and John Glover gave the paper an opportunity. Cockerill directed coverage that questioned Broadhead's role in a lawsuit involving a gaslight company and the city. Broadhead never answered the charges publicly. His friend and law partner, Alonzo W. Slayback, stepped in instead, calling the Post-Dispatch nothing more than a "blackmailing sheet." Cockerill's response, on the 13th of October 1882, was to reprint an offensive card by Glover that the paper had already run the prior year on the 11th of November 1881. Slayback was incensed. He went directly to Cockerill's offices to demand an apology. Cockerill shot and killed him, later claiming self-defense; a pistol was reportedly found on Slayback's body. A grand jury declined to indict Cockerill for murder, but the paper paid an economic price. By May 1883, Pulitzer had sent Cockerill north to manage the New York World, ending his St. Louis tenure under a shadow that the paper could not simply print its way out of.

• 3. The Pulitzer Platform

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  On the 10th of April 1907, Joseph Pulitzer set down in writing what he expected the paper to stand for after he was gone. His words were direct: the paper would "always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party." He went further, pledging that it would "always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor." The statement was explicit about independence, too: the paper would be "drastically independent" and "never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Pulitzer framed the whole passage as a guarantee that his retirement would change nothing about the paper's character. Generations of his family honored that promise in one way or another. His great-grandson, Joseph Pulitzer IV, was the last family member to guide the company, departing in 1995. The paper's liberal editorial page and its roster of cartoonists, including Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1955, and Bill Mauldin, who won the same prize in 1959, kept that combative tradition alive through the 20th century.

• 4. Scoops and Singular Moments

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  On the 22nd of May 1946, the Post-Dispatch became the first newspaper in the world to publish the secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a diplomatic revelation with obvious consequences for how the world understood the prewar period. Four years later, in 1950, the paper sent reporter Dent McSkimming to Brazil to cover the FIFA World Cup. McSkimming paid his own travel expenses and was, by the paper's account, the only U.S. reporter in all of Brazil covering the tournament. The paper had already staked out a combative stance toward Harry S. Truman during his presidency, associating him with the Pendergast machine in Kansas City and repeatedly attacking his integrity. These were not incidental moments. They reflected a paper willing to position itself in the center of events that others circled from a distance. The paper was also among the first daily newspapers in the country to print a comics section in color, placing it on the back page of a section it styled the "Everyday Magazine." Decades later, in 2015, the paper's coverage of the Ferguson Uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, earned it the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography.

• 5. The Weatherbird's Long Flight

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  On the 11th of February 1901, the paper placed a small cartoon bird on its front page alongside the daily weather forecast. That bird, called the "Weatherbird," has appeared every day since, making it the oldest continuously published cartoon in the United States. Harry B. Martin drew it first, holding the assignment through 1903. Oscar Chopin took over from 1903 to 1910, followed by S. Carlisle Martin from 1910 to 1932. Amadee Wohlschlaeger drew the bird for nearly half a century, from 1932 to 1981. Albert Schweitzer became the first artist to draw the Weatherbird in color, holding the role from 1981 to 1986. Dan Martin has carried the assignment since 1986. The bird's survival through changes of ownership, format shifts, circulation declines, and rounds of layoffs says something about the grip a small recurring feature can have on an institution's identity. What began as an illustrated weather note in 1901 outlasted the paper's founding family, its broadsheet format, and its Monday print edition.

• 6. Ownership, Decline, and New Pressures

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  On the 31st of January 2005, Michael Pulitzer announced the sale of Pulitzer, Inc. and all its assets to Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, for $1.46 billion in cash. He stated that no family members would sit on the board of the merged company. At that point the Post-Dispatch ranked as the fifth-largest newspaper in the Midwest and the 26th-largest in the country. Daily circulation, which had stood at 213,472 in the period ending the 30th of September 2010, fell to 191,631 the following year and then to 178,801 the year after that. By the 30th of September 2016, the daily figure had dropped to 98,104, with Sunday at 157,543. In September 2024, six newsroom employees were laid off. The following month the paper announced it would close its St. Louis press facility and send printing to Columbia, Missouri, eliminating 72 jobs in total. By November 2025 the paper had moved to a six-day print schedule, cutting the Monday edition. In December 2025, billionaire investor David Hoffmann became majority shareholder of Lee Enterprises after reportedly taking issue with the paper's coverage of his own $100 million investment plan to revitalize Augusta, Missouri. That plan, which included helicopter tours and a golf course, collapsed and generated numerous lawsuits. At a February 2026 event with the St. Louis Business Journal, Hoffmann announced plans to move company headquarters to Davenport, Iowa, and described the paper as "a little too left" in its news coverage and editorials.