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978-1-878086-78-5
1-878086-78-2
$24.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
325 pages black-and-white photographs
Down Home Press |
Jimmy Hurley planned to tell
the newsroom first. He would make it short and sweet. He didn't want the
paper to be late.
The staff gathered in the
corner, near the desk of veteran reporter and columnist Rose Post, who
already knew the news and had to suppress tears as the publisher began
addressing the staff.
Hurley came right to the
point. His family was selling The Salisbury Post, one of North
Carolina's, and the country's, finest afternoon daily newspapers.
"Today's the day we're
going out of the newspaper business," Hurley said. "It's a
tough thing for me, but the paper will keep going like it always has.
What bothers me more than anything is that for the first time in almost
one hundred years my family won't be in the newspaper business."
People who worked at the Post
knew they worked at a special place and the Hurley family made it that.
Now they would be working for the Evening Post Publishing
Company of Charleston, South Carolina, which owned eight newspapers and
nine television stations, but the company was still privately held, not
one of the huge public conglomerates that now control most newspapers.
Five decades ago,
three-fourths of all newspapers in the United States were family-owned.
Now just a handful remain, only six in North Carolina.
In telling the story of The
Salisbury Post and its sale, Mark Wineka tells the story of that
transformation.
about the author
Mark Wineka is a senior reporter for The Salisbury Post. A
native of Dover, Pennsylvania, he has a degree in journalism from Penn
State University. He worked for The Daily Independent of
Kannapolis, North Carolina, and The Daily Item of Sumter, South
Carolina, before joining the Post. He and his wife have two
children and live in Salisbury. He is also the author of Lion's
Share, a history of the highly successful Food Lion supermarket
chain.
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