Charleston Gazette-Mail
The Charleston Gazette-Mail is a non-daily morning newspaper in Charleston, West Virginia. It is the product of a July 2015 merger between The Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail. It is one of nine papers owned by HD Media. It publishes Tuesday-Saturday, with the Saturday paper being dated "Weekend", with updates on its website on Sundays and Mondays.
Type
Semi-Daily newspaper
Doug Skaff [1]
Lee Wolverton [2]
1873
1001 Virginia St. E.
Charleston, WV 25301
United States
40,671 Daily
68,940 Sunday (as of 2009)[3]
Awards[edit]
Eric Eyre, a Gazette-Mail reporter, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his documentation of the 780 million prescription painkillers that multibillion-dollar drug companies poured into small West Virginia towns via pharmacies.
Ken Ward Jr., a Gazette-Mail reporter, received a 2018 fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation (commonly referred to as a "genius grant"). Ward also was one of the first reporters chosen for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network, which began in 2018.
The newspaper has won the top award for general editorial excellence from the West Virginia Press Association each year since the Gazette and Daily Mail were combined.
Business practices and controversies[edit]
Despite editorial support for many labor unions in other industries, in 1972, the company employed strike breakers to eliminate unions of its own. The company remains non-union.
Three days after running an editorial relative to a pension dispute between Patriot Coal and some of its former workers, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation filed a $1.3 million lien on the company because of "years of unpaid pension deposits".
Antitrust activity[edit]
On February 4, 2021, HD Media, the owner of the Gazette, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook, Inc., claiming that the companies have unlawfully manipulated the digital advertising market at the expense of the newspaper. According to The Wall Street Journal, while both Facebook and Google have faced antitrust scrutiny from the federal government, the lawsuit was the first of its kind to be filed by an individual news outlet.[16] Later in the year, it was reported by Axios that over 200 newspapers across the United States have filed similar lawsuits against Facebook and Google under similar grounds.[17]