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The Gazette's purchase by the Journal in the spring of 1899, and the first Journal-Gazette masthead of June 14, 1899, did more than combine two papers: it reversed a party. The Gazette had been founded in 1863 as a Republican paper for Lincoln; the Journal was the Democratic organ; the combined Journal Gazette came out Democratic, and remained aligned with the Democratic Party until 1973, when it settled into the independence it has claimed since. Scott M. Bushnell's history of the paper — Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions (2007), written by a working journalist and the standard modern account this chapter relies on — reads the Journal Gazette's long arc as the American newspaper's own: from a political sheet founded to win elections, through the professionalizing decades of the Leonards and their successors, to a twentieth-century news organization that fought its fights on the editorial page and reported the rest straight. The paper's own anniversary history, marking 160 years on May 2, 2023, states its defining fact plainly: locally owned since 1863.
Local ownership was not a slogan but a structure. The publisher's family that bought the paper in 1930 — the Inskeeps — held it across the century: Richard Inskeep joined the paper in 1949, and the publisher in the modern era, Julie Inskeep, carried the family's tenure into the twenty-first century, with publisher Sherry Skufca and editor Jim Touvell listed at the paper in the mid-2020s. The one publisher who reached beyond print was William Kunkel, who held the paper before the Inskeep purchase and who founded its broadcasting arm — WKJG radio in 1947 and WKJG-TV in 1953, the call letters spelling out William Kunkel Journal Gazette. Kunkel died in 1949 at his desk, with his son beside him. His stations are treated below; his newspaper, alone among Fort Wayne's founding media, still publishes every morning.
Sources: Bushnell, Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions (2007) and its reviews; Allen County Genealogical Society, Journal Gazette record and the paper's 160th anniversary history (May 2, 2023); The Journal Gazette reference entries for the Inskeep purchase (1930), Kunkel's death (1949), and the paper's current masthead.