Lexington Herald-Leader

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Lexington Herald-Leader
The July 27, 2005 front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	The McClatchy Company
Publisher	Tim Kelly
Editor	Linda Austin
Founded	1870 (as the Lexington Herald)
Headquarters	100 Midland Avenue Lexington, KY 40508-1999 United States
Circulation	114,135 Daily 141,019 Sunday^[1]

Website: Kentucky.com

The Lexington Herald-Leader is a newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company and based in the U.S. city of Lexington, Kentucky. According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the Lexington Herald-Leader, with a circulation of 113,036, was the ninety-second largest daily in the United States and second largest in the state of Kentucky. The newspaper has won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Lexington had two major newspapers before 1983, the Democratic morning edition Herald and the Republican Lexington Leader, an afternoon paper. In 1937, the owner, John Stoll, consolidated the Sunday editions and began publishing the Sunday Herald-Leader. In 1973, Knight purchased the Herald-Leader Company and Knight Ridder merged the Herald and Leader weekday papers into the Herald-Leader in 1983.^[2] The Herald-Leader usually endorses Democratic candidates for political office.

During July 2001 the paper reduced 15 positions in the wake of declining advertising revenues combined with an emergence of Internet news outlets. Long-time columnists Don Edwards and Dick Burdette took voluntary early retirements but are still published occasionally as contributing writers. Dave Wilkinson, vice president for promotion and creative services, accepted a voluntary buyout. Elsewhere workers were laid off in the promotion/creative services, circulation, and advertising departments.

On July 4, 2004, the newspaper, in an effort to apologize for failing to cover the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, published a front-page package of stories and archive photos documenting Lexingtonians involved in the movement. The stories, written by Linda B. Blackford and Linda Minch, received international attention, including a story on the front page of The New York Times.

The publisher is Timothy M. Kelly. Linda Austin is the editor. The managing editor responsible for the news staff and day to day operations is W. Thomas Eblen, a Lexington native and former reporter and editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder for about $4 billion in cash and stock on June 27, 2006. It also assumed Knight Ridder debt of $2 billion. McClatchy sold 12 Knight Ridder papers, but the Herald-Leader was one of 20 retained.

[edit] Office and production plant

The Herald-Leader's new office and production plant facility was completed in September of 1980 at a cost of $23 million ^[3]. It was a "state-of-the-art" 158,990 square-feet structure that featured 14 Goss Metro offset presses that had the capacity to produce 600,000 newspapers in a typical week.

The plant is on a 6-acre lot at the corner of East Main Street and Midland. The $23 million cost was divided into $7,804,000 for architecture, $750,000 for interiors and $8,500,000 for production equipment and presses.

[edit] References

^ 2006 Top 100 Daily Newspapers in the U.S. by Circulation (PDF). BurrellesLuce (2006-03-31). Retrieved on 2007-03-02.
^ Lexington Herald-Leader. The McClatchy Company. Retrieved on 2007-03-02.
^ Mastiff, Bruce. "Outward Bound - Landlocked Lexington Survives and Grows." Kentucky Monthly 2.3 (1981)."