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| Jersey Journal Building |
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The Jersey Journal is Jersey City's long-time daily newspaper. The signage atop its five-story building dominates the Journal Square Center. John T. Rowland, Jr., a native of Jersey City, designed the building in 1921 at the time of the renovation of the area for new bridges over the Pennsylvania Railroad cut and the Hudson and Manhattan (now PATH) station. The newspaper began as the Evening Journal on May 2, 1867, at 13 Exchange Place with a reported initial capitalization of $119 and was owned by the Evening Journal Association. The paper relocated several times before settling at its namesake building at 30 "Journal" Square. It moved from Exchange Place to the Darcy Building (now the Fuller Building at Hudson and Montgomery Streets), to 158 Greene Street (between York and Montgomery Streets) in 1869, and to a new building at 37 Montgomery Streets in 1874. The newspaper moved to present-day Journal Square in 1911 and moved into its 30 Journal Square location in 1925. Robert Larkins, an editorial page editor, once called the Jersey Journal, "a paper with an independent political outlook with Democratic leaning." However, when the paper started as the Evening Journal, he describes the paper as "the pronounced and vigorous advocate of Republican principles and general policy of the Republican Party. It has supported and advocated the election of the national and state candidates of that party," wrote associate editor Alexander McLean in 1895"(Quoted in Weiss, 1992). The newspaper's founders,
William Dunning and Zebian K. Pangborn, were both Republicans and former
Union Army officers. They supported the party's overall Reconstruction
program of the Republican Party and its civil rights program of equal
rights for African-Americans, but they took an independent editorial stand
against the arrival of Irish Catholics into the city. Active in city politics,
Pangborn served as the chairman of the 1870 city charter commission. The
paper was a four-page broadsheet edition with six columns to the page.
Under the editorship of Joseph A. Dear II, who succeeded his father as editor, the Journal opposed the mayor's tactics and referred to his supporters as "Hague's Hoodlums" in both words and political cartoons. Hague reacted by attempting to bring the presses to a halt with tactics that included interference with newspaper sales, advertising, and distribution, as well as raising its tax assessment in 1926 by $175,000. Hague even wanted to rename Journal Square "Veterans Square" in retaliation for the paper's endorsement of his political opponent in the mayoralty election of 1929, but the name was too entrenched in city's frame of reference. According to Jersey Journal reporter Peter Weiss, the paper's general support of Democratic politics came during the Depression era and its reform policies. After Hague's tenure, the Jersey Journal supported his nephew Frank Hague Eggers for mayor and opposed the successful candidate John V. Kenny. In 1950 the Jersey Journal campaigned against the commission form of government that brought Hague to power and advocated a return to the mayor-council form of government, which was adopted. When a return to the commission form of government was again suggested in 1982, the Jersey Journal defended the status quo. In 1945, S.I. Newhouse, Sr., bought the Jersey Journal from the Dear family. Today it is one of the newspapers published by the Newhouse-owned Advance Publications that includes The Star-Ledger and numerous daily and weekly newspapers. Newhouse began his vast newspaper holdings with its purchase of the Staten Island Advance and Ledger of Essex County in 1935. The Jersey Journal then purchased the daily Jersey Observer in 1951 and the Bayonne Times in 1971. The Observer or "The Obie" began as a weekly in 1892 in Hoboken and was the Hudson Observer from 1911 to 1924. To reflect the merger, the masthead of the Jersey Journal was changed to the Jersey Journal and Jersey Observer in 1998. When the Hudson Dispatch closed in 1991, the Journal began a Hudson Dispatch edition. The last ten years have brought changes to Jersey City's daily newspaper. The printing of the newspaper moved from 30 Journal Square to the Bergen Record's Commercial Printing facility in Rockaway, NJ, in 1996 to allow for color printing. It also began publishing a Spanish-language weekly newspaper, El Nuevo Hudson, in recognition of the city's growing Hispanic population to 28 per cent and today has a readership of approximately 60,000. The newspaper may also be accessed electronically on the Internet and begun publication of the local weeklies, Bayonne Journal, Kearny Journal, and Waterfront Journal in 2002. More recently, however, the Jersey Journal's future has been threatened with problems related to a reduction in circulation from as many as 100,000 newspapers a day in 1970 to approximately 40,000 and a loss of advertising revenue. In March 2002 negotiations between Newhouse owners and unions representing the employees prevented a shut down of the newspaper's operations. On April 25, 2005, the Jersey Journal published its first tabloid edition of the paper, abandoning its broadsheet format after 138 years and following the trend for tabloids in urban communities. References: |
| By: Carmela Karnoutsos Project Administrator: Patrick Shalhoub |
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