The Rivalry as a Civic Institution

For most of the twentieth century, Fort Wayne argued with itself in two voices, morning and afternoon. The Journal Gazette, Democratic in inheritance and liberal in its modern editorial identity, and the News-Sentinel, Republican in inheritance and conservative in its own, bickered daily — Bushnell's history, in its publisher's summary, describes the two papers' running fights of the 1930s and 1940s over the New Deal, Wendell Willkie's presidential bid, and Charles Lindbergh's "America First" campaign as a mirror of the nation's own divided mind, conducted on facing editorial pages of the same press run. The fights changed with the decades: the papers plunged, at different times and not always on the same side, into the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of Nazism, the Vietnam War, and abortion. In the 1920s, notably, both papers campaigned against the Klan — the News and Sentinel under Jesse Greene in the assault treated in the next entry, and the Journal-Gazette in its own columns, as the scholarly record of Greene's campaign confirms.

The rivalry was also a division of labor that readers used. The News-Sentinel, afternoon and larger — above 60,000 daily circulation in the 1980s, against the Journal Gazette's roughly ten thousand fewer — owned the day's breaking news and the sports final; the Journal Gazette, morning and locally owned, owned the considered record, the endorsements that moved city elections, and the paper-of-record status the city's other outlets still credit to it. Politicians learned to give the morning paper the announcement and the afternoon paper the reaction. What ended the arrangement was not a victor but the afternoon cycle itself: evening papers died across America as television took the supper hour, and Fort Wayne's version of that national story is told in the entry on the contraction below.

Sources: Bushnell, Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions (2007), publisher's summary and reviews; Peggy Seigel, "A 'Fearless Editor' in a Changing World: Fort Wayne's Jesse Greene," Indiana Magazine of History 113.4 (December 2017) (both papers' anti-Klan campaigns); News-Sentinel reference history (1980s circulation figures); the Current chapter (the Journal Gazette's present paper-of-record standing).