Type | Daily newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | Landmark Media Enterprises |
Founder(s) | Samuel Slover |
Publisher | Pat Richardson |
Editor | Steve Gunn |
Founded | 1865 |
Headquarters | 23510 |
Circulation | 156,968 Daily |
ISSN | 0889-6127 |
Website | PilotOnline.com |
150 West Brambleton Avenue
Norfolk, Virginia
The Virginian-Pilot is a daily newspaper based in Norfolk, Virginia. Commonly known as The Pilot, it is Virginia's largest daily. It serves the five cities of South Hampton Roads as well as several smaller towns across southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. It has been a locally owned, family enterprise since its founding in 1865, at the close of the American Civil War.
The Virginian-Pilot and its sister afternoon edition, the Ledger-Star (which ceased publication in 1995) were created by Samuel L. Slover as the result of several mergers of papers dating back to 1868. The Virginian-Pilot covered the Wright brothers' early flights. Slover's nephew Frank Batten Sr. became publisher at age 27 in 1954. He expanded the Virginian-Pilot's parent company, which soon evolved into Landmark Communications and later Landmark Media Enterprises, by acquiring other newspapers and radio and television stations and by creating The Weather Channel, now owned by a group of investors led by NBC Universal.
In the 1929, editor Louis Jaffe received the Virginian-Pilot's first Pulitzer Prize, for an editorial which condemned lynching. Jaffe mentored the paper's next editor, Lenoir Chambers, who in 1960 received the paper's second Pulitzer for his editorials on desegregation. The paper was one of the few in Virginia to publicly support the end of Jim Crow.
The paper was among the first available online as a part of the Compuserve experiment in early 1980s where the paper and 10 others around the country transmitted text versions of stories daily to Compuserve's host computers in Ohio.