The Louisville Courier-Journal

The July 27, 2005 front page of The Courier-Journal
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Gannett Company, Inc.
Publisher	Wes Jackson
Editor	Joel Christopher
Founded	1868
Headquarters	525 West Broadway Louisville, Kentucky 40201  United States
Circulation	131,208 Daily 224,420 Sunday (as of 2013)
Website	courier-journal.com

The Courier-Journal, locally called "The Courier" or "The C-J", is the main newspaper for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, United States. According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the paper is the 48th-largest daily paper in the U.S. and the single-largest in Kentucky.

The Courier-Journal was created from the merger of several newspapers introduced in Kentucky in the 19th century.

Pioneer paper The Focus of Politics, Commerce and Literature, was founded in 1826 in Louisville when the city was an early settlement of less than 7,000 individuals. In 1830 a new newspaper, The Louisville Daily Journal, began distribution in the city and, in 1832, absorbed The Focus of Politics, Commerce and Literature. The Journal was an organ of the Whig Party, founded and edited by George D. Prentice, a New Englander who initially came to Kentucky to write a biography of Henry Clay. Prentice would edit the Journal for more than 40 years.

In 1844, another newspaper, the Louisville Morning Courier was founded in Louisville by Walter Newman Haldeman. The Louisville Daily Journal and the Louisville Morning Courier were the news leaders in Louisville and were politically opposed throughout the Civil War; The Journal was against slavery while the Courier was pro-Confederacy. The Courier was suppressed by the Union and had to move to Nashville, but returned to Louisville after the war.

In 1868, an ailing Prentice persuaded the 28-year-old Henry Watterson to come edit for the Journal. During secret negotiations in 1868, The Journal and the Courier merged and the first edition of The Courier-Journal was delivered to Louisvillians on Sunday morning, November 8, 1868.

Henry Watterson, the son of a Tennessee congressman, had written for Harper's Magazine and the New York Times before enlisting in the Confederate Army. He became nationally known for his work as The Courier-Journal emerged as the region's leading paper. He supported the Democratic Party and pushed for the industrialization of Kentucky and the South in general, notably through urging the Southern Exposition be held in Louisville. He attracted controversy for attempting to prove that Christopher Marlowe had actually written the works of Shakespeare. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1917 for editorials demanding the United States enter World War I.