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The News-Sentinel's finest hour came near the end of its strength. For its coverage of the devastating Fort Wayne flood of March 1982 — coverage the Pulitzer board called courageous and resourceful — the paper won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the only Pulitzer in the city's press history; the flood itself is in the Events record. In 1992 the Hoosier State Press Association named the News-Sentinel its Blue Ribbon Newspaper of the Year. The Journal Gazette, meanwhile, survived its own chain passage: when Knight Ridder's 2006 sale to McClatchy briefly put both Fort Wayne papers in one corporate hand, McClatchy sold the News-Sentinel on to Ogden, and the Journal Gazette remained what it had been since 1863 — privately held and locally owned, its business functions handled by the joint company.
The contraction, when it came, followed the national script with local dates. On August 24, 2017, Ogden announced the News-Sentinel would cease its daily print edition and go digital-first; under the JOA, the Journal Gazette agreed to carry a page of News-Sentinel content Monday through Saturday — the afternoon paper reduced, in print, to a page inside the morning paper. On August 10, 2018, seven of the paper's remaining eight employees were laid off, leaving columnist Kevin Leininger as its staff of one. Ogden named Scott Stanford publisher on February 27, 2019, but the end came with the pandemic: citing COVID-19's financial impact, Fort Wayne Newspapers suspended publication of the News-Sentinel on April 23, 2020 — its last online edition — and Leininger was furloughed; summary accounts date the paper's closure to November 2020, the discrepancy carried in the note filed with this chapter. The Journal Gazette publishes on: six days a week since January 28, 2023, when it folded its larger Sunday edition into a Saturday Weekend Edition, behind a paywall, still at 600 West Main Street, still — in the Current chapter's phrase — the paper of record the other outlets credit. The two-paper city that began with Tigar's hand press in 1833 ended, as a daily fact, in 2020.
Sources: News-Sentinel reference history (1983 Pulitzer Prize, for coverage of the March 1982 flood; 1992 Blue Ribbon award; August 24, 2017 print announcement; August 10, 2018 layoffs; Stanford appointment; April 23, 2020 suspension and Leininger's furlough); Adweek (August 24, 2017); America's Newspapers (May 1, 2020); The Journal Gazette reference history (2006 McClatchy passage; January 2023 Sunday-to-Saturday change); the Current chapter.