Lexington Herald Leader

Lexington Herald-Leader

The June 1, 2012 front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	The McClatchy Company
Publisher	Rufus Friday
Editor	Peter Baniak
Staff writers	143
Founded	1870 (as the Lexington Daily Press)
Headquarters	100 Midland Avenue Lexington, Kentucky 40508 United States
Circulation	55,833 Daily 63,458 Sunday (as of 2013)
ISSN	0745-4260
Website	Kentucky.com

The Lexington Herald-Leader is a newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company and based in the U.S. city of Lexington, Kentucky. According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the Herald-Leader's paid circulation is the second largest in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The newspaper has won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. It had also been a finalist in six other Pulitzer awards in the 22-year period up until its sale in 2006, a record that was unsurpassed by any mid-sized newspaper in the United States during the same time frame.

The publisher is Rufus Friday, and Peter Baniak is the editor.

The Herald-Leader was created by a 1983 merger of the Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader. The story of the Herald begins in 1870 with a paper known as the Lexington Daily Press. In 1895, a descendant of that paper was first published as the Morning Herald, later to be renamed the Lexington Herald in 1905. Meanwhile, in 1898 a group of Fayette County Republicans began publication of a competing afternoon paper named the Kentucky Leader, which became known as the Lexington Leader in 1901.

In 1937, the owner of the Leader, John Stoll, purchased the Herald. The papers continued as independent entities for 46 years. Despite the common ownership, the two papers had different editorial stances; the Herald was moderately liberal while the Leader was conservative. The two newspapers published a combined Sunday edition. In 1973, both were purchased by Knight Newspapers, which merged with Ridder Publications to form Knight Ridder the following year. A decade later, in 1983, the Herald and Leader merged to form today's Lexington Herald-Leader. In 1985, publisher Creed Black allowed reporters to publish a series of articles which exposed widespread corruption within the University of Kentucky's Wildcats men's basketball team. From 1979 to 1991, the paper was edited by John Carroll, who went on to edit The Baltimore Sun and The Los Angeles Times.