The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The modern Fort Wayne press was created by a merger of rivals inside the Sentinel line. The News Publishing Company, publisher of the Daily News, purchased the Sentinel in 1917, and on January 1, 1918, issued the first edition of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel — an afternoon paper that joined the News's local-news energy to the Sentinel's 1833 lineage, a lineage the combined paper never stopped claiming: the News-Sentinel counted itself, to the end, among the oldest businesses in Allen County. The man who made it the city's dominant paper came up through its counting room. Oscar G. Foellinger began at the News Publishing Company in the mid-1890s as a junior accountant, guided its business operations, engineered the acquisition of the Sentinel, and in 1920 assumed control of the News-Sentinel outright. Under Oscar Foellinger the paper became a leading voice for Republican politics in the region and a force for civic improvement; in 1925 he built its landmark home, the News-Sentinel Building at Barr Street and Jefferson Boulevard — since 1958 known as the Foellinger Center.
Oscar's death remade the paper again. On a hunting trip to Canada in October 1936 he died unexpectedly, aged fifty-one, and the publisher's chair passed to his daughter. What Helene Foellinger did with the News-Sentinel over the next forty-five years is treated in her own entry below; here it is enough to mark the shape of the era she inherited and extended: an afternoon paper with one of the highest per-capita circulations in the country, the larger of the city's two dailies for most of the twentieth century, edited day to day by Ernest "Ernie" Williams and staffed by reporters whom the record notes went on to larger papers and to broadcast journalism. The afternoon cycle — news gathered in the morning, printed by noon, on porches by supper — was the rhythm of Fort Wayne's information for two generations.
Sources: Fort Wayne Magazine, "Starting the presses" (July 2015), drawing on Jim Sack's chapter in History of Fort Wayne & Allen County; Foellinger Foundation, "Pressing On" (foundation history of Oscar and Helene Foellinger); ARCH Fort Wayne, News Sentinel Building record; the Business chapter for the firm's ownership line.