Laurel Leader
newspaper in Laurel, Maryland
The Laurel Leader was a weekly newspaper which had been published continually since 1897, serving the greater Laurel, Maryland, area, including Prince George's, Montgomery, Anne Arundel, and Howard Counties. In its final form, The Leader operated as a subsidiary of The Baltimore Sun.
History
Paper ownership
In 1897, James Curley founded The Leader in Laurel. Between 1897 and 1980, the ownership passed from Curley to G. Bowie McCeney to Gertrude Poe. In July 1980, Patuxent Publishing Company bought the newspaper. In September 1997, Patuxent Publishing was sold to The Baltimore Sun which was a subsidiary of Times Mirror. In June 2000, Tribune Publishing purchased Times Mirror and thus the Baltimore Sun, Patuxent Publishing, and the Laurel Leader.
James Curley era (1897–1938)
In 1897 attorney James Curley founded The Leader, a weekly newspaper serving the approximately 2,600 residents of the city of Laurel, MD. It replaced the Free Quill, one of at least six newspapers which existed in the city in the second half of the nineteenth century. Curley created the Leader to "further his business interests and rally local Republicans," and the paper focused on national and sensational news rather than local news. Of the eight pages published each week, six consisted of national and international news while the only two were devoted to local news as well as advertisements.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laurel Leader” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.