Hollister Free Lance
| Type | Weekly newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | New SV Media (Metro Newspapers) Dan Pulcrano |
| Founder(s) | J. McGonigle |
| Publisher | Dan Pulcrano |
| Editor | Kollin Kosmicki |
| Sports editor | Emanuel Lee |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | 350 Sixth St., Suite 102 Hollister, California 95023 United States |
| Sister newspapers | Gilroy Dispatch, Morgan Hill Times |
| Website |
The Hollister Free Lance is an American weekly newspaper published in Hollister, California and distributed in San Benito County, California.
J. McGonigle founded The Free Lance as the Hollister Enterprise on October 18, 1873. On December 10, 1886, W.B. Winn began publishing under the Free Lance nameplate. After eight years of publishing in Hollister, Winn sold the newspaper in February 1891 to J. L. Lahiff and moved to San Francisco. The Free Lance merged with the Hesperian.
Lahiff was city editor, and business partner Robert P. Stephenson served as editor. "The paper is enthusiastically and aggressively Republican in politics," an 1893 author wrote. Printer James Piratsky acquired a 50 percent interest in the newspaper around that time. The Hollister newspaper market was a competitive one. In 1921, the publisher of the Free Lance, which claimed a circulation of 1,019, placed an ad in Editor and Publisher, a trade magazine, offering a $250 reward to anyone who could produce proof that the Morning Daily Advance of Hollister published more than 1,026 copies.
McClatchy Newspapers purchased the Free Lance in 1981. On February 28, 1997, McClatchy sold the Dispatch, along with the Hollister Free Lance, the Morgan Hill Times and the Amador Ledger to Independent Newspapers Ltd. of New Zealand. Independent's largest shareholder was Australia-based News Ltd., controlled by publisher Rupert Murdoch. The New Zealand group sold the papers in 1998 to Central Valley Publishing Holdings, Inc., an operator of 30 small-market papers that was based in Festus, Missouri.
At the end of 2003, Mainstreet Media, a company formed by Central Valley Publishing executives and backed by private equity funding, acquired the publishing group. A year later, the group acquired its competitor, The Pinnacle, from Tracie Cone and Anna Marie dos Remedios, who had purchased The Pinnacle in 1999. Cone retired from the Pinnacle in 2005 and in 2006 ran unsuccessfully for San Benito County supervisor. The Pinnacle nameplate was retired in 2013. The same year, Mainstreet’s controlling shareholder, The Brookside Group of Stamford, CT, put its California newspapers on the market.
In April 2014, the Hollister Free Lance returned to ownership by a Northern California publisher with its purchase by New SV Media Inc., a subsidiary of Metro Newspapers of San Jose, California. In October 2014, Metro’s CEO began to move the paper away from its alignment with petroleum drilling interests and attacks on environmentalists, publicly separating itself from a $1.9 million oil company-funded political campaign in opposition to San Benito County Measure J that heavily featured the Free Lance’s logo and quotes from an opinion piece by its former editorial board.
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