Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) 1896-Current
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,162 issues from 1898 to 1910, published in Newport News, Virginia, digitised for Chronicling America.
Founded in Newport News in 1896 as a four-page penny newspaper, the Daily Press issued its first edition on January 4, less than two weeks before the General Assembly recognized the port town as a city.
Newport News had grown rapidly since 1880 when railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington had declared the port particularly “ideal for enterprise” and had extended the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway from Richmond to the Virginia Peninsula, thereby providing a new outlet for the export of West Virginia’s vast resources of bituminous coal. Ten years later, Huntington built his first dry dock in Newport News. His shipyard quickly grew into an economic goliath, with the fortunes of Newport News again following closely behind. The Daily Press, owned and edited by Charles E. Thacker, soon established itself as the primary daily morning newspaper covering the Virginia Peninsula.
Thacker edited the paper from a small print shop in the basement of the First National Bank. The maiden issue’s editorial column stated, “A newspaper that pleases all of its readers cannot be found this side of Utopia. It is not expected that the Daily Press will be this rara avis of the journalistic world in this respect. The publishers will endeavor, however, to make the best paper ever published on the Peninsula—a paper worthy of the growing city of Newport News.” Thacker especially promised “to espouse the right and oppose the wrong wherever found.”
By 1910, the Daily Press had a circulation of 1,700–still,…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Newport News, Virginia, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress