Bristol Herald Courier

Office of the Bristol Herald Courier in Bristol, Va. Daily newspaper
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Berkshire Hathaway
Founded	1865
Political alignment	Independent
Headquarters	320 Morrison Blvd Bristol, VA 24201 United States
ISSN	1552-2458
Website	heraldcourier.com

The Bristol Herald Courier is a 39,000 circulation daily newspaper owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The newspaper is located in Bristol, Virginia, a small city located in Southwest Virginia on the Tennessee border.

The Herald Courier is in what the media industry calls a converged newsroom, meaning its online (heraldcourier.com) print (Herald Courier) and broadcast (WJHL-Johnson City) operations work together closely. Herald Courier reporters are trained to occasionally deliver webcasts of Bristol news, conduct TV "talk-backs" with WJHL and gather audio for daily stories. News Channel 11 reporters often have bylined stories that appear in the Herald Courier news pages. Under Media General, both operations provided content for TriCities.com, a subsidiary of Media General's Digital Media Department. The future of the website is said to be up in the air.

In 2010, the Herald Courier won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the highest honor in American journalism, for "illuminating the murky mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to thousands of land owners in southwest Virginia, spurring remedial action by state lawmakers."

The beginning of the present Bristol Herald Courier came in 1865. That was the year John Slack founded the Bristol News, a publication which continued until after the turn of the century. In 1870, Slack launched the Bristol Courier, a weekly which became Bristol's first daily paper in 1888. George L. Carter, founder of the Clinchfield Railroad, moved to Bristol in 1903 and founded the Bristol Herald. When Carter left Bristol in 1907 the Herald was combined with the Courier and became the Bristol Herald Courier.

On October 16, 1949, T. Eugene Worrell and a number of the city's leading businessmen launched the Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, first published in direct competition with the Herald Courier and the evening News Bulletin. After many months of intense rivalry, the Herald Courier and Virginia-Tennessean joined in a printing agreement allowing both to carry on competitively in news and editorial fields while enjoying economies afforded by joint operations.