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1831 — the present
The frame: South Bend was a press town before it was a city. Its first newspaper was printed in 1831, when the settlement was a trading post on the St. Joseph River, and for the next century and a half the city's public business ran through its papers: a Whig register that made a Speaker of the House, a Democratic line that ran from 1853 to 1938 under five names, a Polish semi-weekly and a shelf of Hungarian papers on the west side, and the Tribune, founded in 1872 by two Register men who walked out of the older paper and outlasted every rival. In 1922 the Tribune put the city's second radio license on the air — its first station died within months — and the newspaper company built the market's radio and television for the next ninety-four years, until the family sold the stations in 2016 and the paper itself in 2019. The broadcast line the Tribune started is only half the air record: Notre Dame built its own stations, the school corporation has run a station since 1958, and a WSBT sportscaster built Notre Dame football into the first truly national radio network in college sports. This chapter carries the institutions — who founded them, who edited and published them, and how each one ended or endures. The papers as sources for everything else in this history are carried in the Sources chapter; the people who built the stations' programs are carried in the Producers chapter.
Sources:
- The entries that follow — each paper and station rests on its own records, the federal radio record, and the press of record, cited with it.
- Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter VII, "The Press" — the Story of South Bend section of the nineteenth-century newspaper record, read first-hand.