The Clarion-Ledger is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It is the second oldest company in the state of Mississippi and is one of only a few newspapers in the nation that continues to circulate statewide. It is an operating division of Gannett River States Publishing Corporation, owned by Gannett Company.

History

The paper traces its roots to The Eastern Clarion, founded in Jasper County, Mississippi, in 1837. Later that year, it was sold and moved to Meridian, Mississippi.

After the American Civil War, it was moved to Jackson and merged with The Standard. It soon became known as The Clarion.

Four employees who were displaced by the merger founded their own newspaper, The Jackson Evening Post, in 1882.

In 1888, The Clarion merged with the State Ledger and became known as the Daily Clarion-Ledger.

In 1907, Fred Sullens purchased an interest in the competing The Jackson Evening Post, and shortly after changed the name to the Jackson Daily News. It still remained an evening newspaper.

The Clarion was a weekly newspaper published by Robert Blatchford, based in the United Kingdom. It was a socialist publication though adopting a British-focused rather than internationalist perspective on political affairs, as seen in its support of the British involvement in the Anglo-Boer Wars and the First World War.

History

Blatchford and Alexander M. Thompson founded the paper in Manchester in 1891 on a capital of just £400 (£350 from Thompson and Blatchford and the remaining £50 from Robert's brother Montague Blatchford). In it, he serialised his book, Merrie England, and published work by a variety of journalists, including George Bernard Shaw and the cartoonist Walter Crane. The Clarion Women's column was written initially by Eleanor Keeling Edwards and, from October 1895, as the Women's letters page by Julia Dawson, pen name of Mrs Myddleton-Worrall. It was Julia Dawson who pioneered the famous Clarion Vans which toured small towns and villages throughout England and Scotland from 1896 until 1929 spreading socialist propaganda.