The Roanoke Times
The Roanoke Times is the primary newspaper in Southwestern Virginia and is based in Roanoke, Virginia, United States. It is published by Lee Enterprises. In addition to its headquarters in Roanoke, it maintains a bureau in Christiansburg, covering the eastern New River Valley and Virginia Tech.
Type
Samuel Worthington
1886
English
2l0 Church Ave SW Suite 100
Roanoke, Virginia 24011
United States
19,657 Daily
22,103 Sunday (as of 2023)[1]
According to the 2011 Scarborough “Ranker Report,” The Roanoke Times ranks fifth in the country in terms of percentage of adults reading a newspaper on weekdays in that newspaper's coverage area.
History[edit]
The Roanoke Daily Times began publication in 1886. The paper's original owner, M. H. Claytor, eventually added a companion evening newspaper, The Roanoke Evening News. In 1909, he sold the paper to a group headed by banker J. B. Fishburn. The Fishburn group bought the Roanoke Evening World in 1913, merging it with the Evening News and changing its name to the Roanoke World-News. At the same time, Times-World Corporation was formed as the owner of both papers.
By 1931, Times-World Corporation had expanded into broadcasting with the purchase of WDBJ (now WFIR), Roanoke's first radio station. It eventually spawned an FM station (now WSLC) and a television station (which still has the WDBJ calls). In 1969, Times-World merged with Landmark Communications, which sold off the broadcasting properties and kept the papers. In 1977, Landmark merged the two papers into a single all-day paper, The Roanoke Times & World-News.[2] The World-News was dropped from the masthead in 1995.[3]
Landmark started shopping its newspaper properties in 2008 and sold the Times to Berkshire Hathaway's BH Media Group in 2013.[4] This made the Times a sister publication to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as well as the News & Advance of Lynchburg, the other major paper serving the Roanoke/Lynchburg media market.
As the major daily newspaper for Roanoke and much of Southwest Virginia, The Roanoke Times has extensively covered news events from the area that have gained national media exposure. Some examples include: