Lexington Herald-Leader
The Lexington Herald-Leader [2] is a newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and based in Lexington, Kentucky. According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the paid circulation of the Herald-Leader is the second largest in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Type
Daily newspaper
Richard Green
143
1870
(as the Lexington Daily Press)
100 Midland Avenue
Lexington, Kentucky 40508
United States
34,888 Daily
68,545 Sunday (as of 2017)[2]
The newspaper has won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.[3] It had also been a finalist in six other Pulitzer awards in the 22-year period up until its sale in 2006, a record that was unsurpassed by any mid-sized newspaper in the United States during the same time frame.[4]
Office and production plant[edit]
The Herald-Leader's new office and production plant facility was completed in September 1980 at a cost of $23 million.[9] It was a 158,990 square feet (14,771 m2) structure that featured 14 Goss Metro offset presses that had the capacity to produce 600,000 newspapers in a typical week.
The plant is on a 6-acre (24,000 m2) lot at the corner of East Main Street and Midland. The $23 million cost was divided into $7,804,000 for architecture, $750,000 for interiors and $8,500,000 for production equipment and presses.
In June 2016, it was announced that the Herald-Leader would cease its printing operations in Lexington, passing that role to Louisville-based Gannett Publishing Services. As a result of the move, 25 full-time and 4 part-time employees would be laid-off. It was also announced that the plant would be put up for sale, with the Fayette County property valuation administrator assessing the property at $6.84 million for tax purposes. The first issue of the Louisville-printed Herald-Leader published on August 1, 2016.[10] The last issue of the Lexington Herald-Leader to be printed in Lexington was printed on July 31, 2016. It marked the end of 229 years of newspaper printing in Lexington.[11]
The Herald-Leader building has been proposed as a new city hall for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.[12] Remaining staff will be relocated to a smaller office space upon the sale of the building.