Press-Register

The September 26, 2006 front page of the Press-Register
Type	Thrice Weekly newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Advance Publications
Publisher	Ricky Mathews
Editor	Mike Marshall
Founded	1813
Headquarters	401 North Water Street Mobile, Alabama 36602
Sister newspapers	The Huntsville Times The Birmingham News The Mississippi Press
Website	www.al.com/press-register/ www.gulflive.com/mississippipress/

The Press-Register (known from 1997 to 2006 as the Mobile Register) is a thrice-weekly newspaper serving the southwest Alabama counties of Mobile and Baldwin. The newspaper is a descendant of one founded in 1813, making the Press-Register Alabama's oldest newspaper. It is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns the primary newspapers in Birmingham, Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana. The Press-Register had a daily publication schedule since the inception of its predecessors in the early 1800s until September 30, 2012, at which time it and its sister papers reduced to print editions only on Wednesday, Fridays and Sundays. The Press Register also publishes an edition for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, The Mississippi Press.

The Mobile Gazette was founded and began publication shortly after Mobile was captured by United States troops in April 1813 after 33 years under Spanish rule. Another Mobile-based newspaper would begin publishing on December 10, 1821 as The Mobile Commercial Register by former Boston, Massachusetts resident and Savannah, Georgia merchant Jonathan Battelle, along with John W. Townsend of a Montgomery, Alabama newspaper. One year later, the Gazette was taken over by the Register, making it a good purchase for one Thaddeus Sanford in 1828. Under Sanford, the Mobile Patriot newspaper was bought out, thus becoming part of the daily Mobile Daily Commercial Register and Patriot in 1832. The Register is sold yet again in 1837, this time to Epapheas Kibby and Mobile attorney John Forsyth Jr., who would have a 40-year relationship with the paper until his death in 1877. The New York Times' eulogy for Forsyth included the phrase, "most important Democratic editor of the South". Mobile's yellow fever epidemic forced the Register to publish only three times a week in 1839. Once Sanford reclaimed what he purchased years before, he combined the Register with the Merchants and Planters Journal, resulting in The Mobile Register and Journal in 1841. Communication's latest innovation the telegraph became the Register's means of receiving news in 1848. After C.A. and C.M. Bradford's purchase of the Register's one-half interest, the paper was renamed The Mobile Daily Register in 1849. Forsyth once again bought back the Register in 1854. Future Confederate colonel and Kentucky poet Theodore O'Hara joined the Register shortly before the American Civil War. Swiss-born propagandist for the Confederacy Henry Hotze also worked for the paper for a time before the war.