Maryland Gazette
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Founder(s) | William Parks, Jonas Green |
| Founded | September 1727 |
The Gazette, founded in 1727 as The Maryland Gazette, is one of the oldest newspapers in America. It's modern-day descendant, The Capital, was acquired by The Baltimore Sun Media Group in 2014. Previously, it was owned by the Capital Gazette Communications group, which published The Capital, Bowie Blade-News, Crofton-West County Gazette, and Capital Style Magazine.
The Gazette and their sister publications have a long history, having been composed and printed in numerous locations, all in the Annapolis area, for more than 270 years. The company has moved headquarters seven times, including from 3 Church Circle to 213 West St. in 1948, and then to 2000 Capital Drive in 1987.
The Maryland Gazette was founded in Annapolis in 1727 and published through 1734 by William Parks. Parks moved to Virginia in 1736.
John Peter Zenger, who learned the trade of a newspaperman as an indentured servant and apprentice printer for the Gazette, later became a New York City editor. His 1735 trial established in American law that printing the truth is not libel or sedition, a key forerunner to the First Amendment to the Constitution and the concept of freedom of the press.
The Gazette's second publisher was Jonas Green, a former protégé of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. The Gazette's early masthead read as follows:
Money was sometimes hard to come by, so Green sometimes traded an ad or a subscription for supplies. His wife, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, also helped to make ends meet by selling homemade chocolates at the post office.
Green, a born troublemaker, hated the Stamp Act, which among other things directly taxed his newspaper. Refusing to pay, he published the Gazette with what was then a blaring headline: "The Maryland Gazette Expiring: In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again." Green wrote that because of the Stamp Act, the newspaper "will not any longer be published." In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, where the tax stamp should have been placed, there appeared instead a skull and crossbones. Calmer heads persuaded Green to return to publishing as part of the struggle against tyranny, and he later resumed publication under this banner headline: "An Apparition of the late Maryland Gazette, which is not dead, but only sleepeth." Defenders of this newspaper's claim as "the oldest in the nation" say this brief interruption of publication was not a business decision as much as a deliberate political statement by a determined and courageous publisher.
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