Phil Lewis: Giving light on a heritage of journalism

Today is the quasquicentennial of the The E.W. Scripps Co., the owner of the Naples Daily News.

On this date 125 years ago, Edward Wyllis Scripps printed his first newspaper. It cost readers a penny and was meant for the working class of Cleveland, Ohio. It also was the first of many successes. By the turn of the century, E.W. had built an American newspaper empire that rivaled Hearst and Pulitzer.

Since I'm on the E.W. Scripps' payroll, we'll let an independent source -- the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition -- brief readers on the company's early years: "E.W. Scripps' first independent venture was starting the Cleveland Penny Press in 1878. He purchased several additional papers and in 1895, with his manager, Milton A. McRae, and his half-brother George Scripps as partners, he set up the Scripps-McRae League, a powerful chain of newspapers. The first such chain in the United States, the Scripps-McRae League was liberal in politics and a crusader for labor. It developed its own news service, and in 1907 Scripps set up the United Press Association, with Roy W. Howard as manager. Scripps also organized the Newspaper Enterprise Association to furnish his papers with features, cartoons, and illustrations. E.W. Scripps' son, Robert P. Scripps, became the partner of Roy Howard in 1922, and the newspaper chain was known as the Scripps-Howard papers." E.W. was fresh off the farm and just 24 years old when he ran off the first edition of the Penny Press, but he had a newspaper pedigree. His grandfather was a noted publisher in England and his father was a London newspaperman before immigrating to the United States and an Illinois farm, where E.W. was born in 1854.

E.W.'s Penny Press, which eventually became known as the Cleveland Press, was priced at a penny so the working class could afford to be readers. Most newspapers at the time cost a nickel.

"The paper consistently sided with organized labor and underdogs generally, and refused -- by reporting their peccadilloes -- to extend the upper classes the journalistic deference to which they had become accustomed," according to a 1999 article on the history of E.W. Scripps written by Barry M. Horstman of the Cincinnati Post, a Scripps newspaper.

That description -- with emphasis on the underdog -- would warm the heart of many a newspaper editor.

The founder of the Penny Press, ironically perhaps, became very wealthy. He spent his final years cruising the world's oceans on "Ohio," his beloved yacht. He died aboard the yacht in March of 1926, in Monrovia Bay, off the coast of Liberia. He was 71.

But, the company lived on and gave us some of the greatest names and personalities in newspaper history.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was columnist Ernie Pyle. His extraordinary reporting put a face on both post-Depression America and World War II.

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin truly put a face on World War II.

In the 1950s, Scripps' United Features syndicate introduced American newspaper readers to Charles Schulz, who in turn introduced Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

With 21 daily newspapers, E.W. Scripps Co. is the nation's ninth largest newspaper publisher. The company entrusts the editorial stance of each newspaper to the local editor. Some of the dailies are considered liberal, some conservative, but all pledge allegiance to a slogan adopted by Scripps about the time of E.W.'s death: "Give light and the people will find their own way."

Phil Lewis is editor of the Daily News; his email address is pplewis@naplesnews.com.