Tulsa World
The Tulsa World is an American daily newspaper. It serves the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is the primary newspaper for the northeastern and eastern portions of Oklahoma. The printed edition is the second-most circulated newspaper in the state, after The Oklahoman.
Type
1905
33,565 Daily
36,484 Sunday (as of 2023)[1]
It was founded in 1905 and locally owned by the Lorton family for almost 100 years until February 2013, when it was sold to BH Media Group,[2] a Berkshire Hathaway company controlled by Warren Buffett.[3] The Tulsa World Media Company became part of Lee Enterprises in 2020.[4] The paper was jointly operated with the Tulsa Tribune from 1941 to 1992.[5]
History[edit]
Republican activist James F. McCoy and Kansas journalist J.R. Brady published the first edition of the Tulsa World on September 14, 1905[6] at the time Brady was starting Tulsa World, he was also publishing the Indian Republican a weekly newspaper, which was previously edited by a con artist named Myron Boyle. Brady had bought the Indian Republican in 1905 and fired Boyle in the following year. Boyle borrowed $500 from Dr. S. G. Kennedy, ostensibly to pay some personal debts. Instead, he left town without repaying Dr. Kennedy.[7]
Brady was sufficiently successful establishing the Tulsa World that it attracted a Missouri mine owner, George Bayne, and his brother-in-law, Charles Dent, who bought and ran the paper for the next five years.[7] In 1911, Eugene Lorton, who had just sold his stake in a Walla Walla, Washington newspaper, and moved to Tulsa, bought an interest in the Tulsa World, becoming its editor,[8] and then, with financial backing from Harry Ford Sinclair, the sole owner and publisher in 1917.[7]
Beginning in 1915, the Tulsa World fought an editorial battle advocating a proposal to build a reservoir on Spavinaw Creek and pipe the water 55 miles to Tulsa.[6] Charles Page was among those who opposed the Spavinaw plan; he advocated a plan in his own newspaper to sell water from the Shell Creek water system, which Page owned.[9][10] Page's newspaper, the Morning News, closed in 1919 after Tulsans approved a bond issue to pipe the water from Spavinaw.[9] He sold a companion paper, Tulsa Democrat, to Richard Lloyd Jones, who renamed it the Tulsa Tribune.[9]
In the 1920s, the Tulsa World was known for its opposition to the Ku Klux Klan,[6] which had risen to local prominence in the wake of the Tulsa Race Riot in the spring of 1921. Lorton was active in Republican Party politics until he was defeated by William B. Pine, in the 1924 primary election for the US Senate; Pine went on to win the general election.[8] Lorton then supported Democrats Alfred E. Smith in the 1928 Presidential election[8] and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. However, Lorton refused to support Roosevelt's third term bid in 1940;[6] he returned to the Republicans and remained a GOP supporter for the rest of his life.[8]
The Tulsa Tribune and Tulsa World entered a joint operating agreement in June 1941.[5] Eugene Lorton died in 1949,[8] leaving majority interest in the newspaper to his wife Maude and smaller shares to four daughters and 20 employees. Eugene's presumed successor, Robert Lorton, had died at age 24 in 1939.[11] In the 1950s, Maude Lorton transferred one-fourth of the company to attorney Byron Boone, who became publisher in 1959. Upon her death, she left the rest of her shares to her grandson Robert. In 1964, Robert Lorton became director of the News Publishing Corporation, which oversaw the non-editorial operations of both the Tulsa Tribune and Tulsa World. In 1968, he became president of the Tulsa World and publisher upon Boone's death in 1988. The Tulsa Tribune ceased operations in 1992 and Tulsa World acquired its assets.[5] Robert Lorton reacquired the World's outstanding shares and made the newspaper entirely family-owned once again. In May 2005, he passed the title of publisher to his son Robert E. Lorton III. During the same year, World Publishing Company had 700 employees, and was ranked as one of Oklahoma's largest employers.[12]
In February 2013, the paper announced that it would be sold to Berkshire Hathaway's BH Media Group, controlled by Warren Buffett.[3] In 2015, BH Media bought six weekly papers and the daily Tulsa Business & Legal News from Community Publishers Inc.[13]
On April 20, 2015, four Tulsa World journalists—including two nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—suddenly resigned their jobs to accept positions at The Frontier, a new online-only publication launched by the former World publisher, Bobby Lorton.[14][15]
In 2016, the World announced it would not endorse any candidate in the 2016 election, saying that the American people had been presented with "the least acceptable list of candidates for president in modern times." The paper had maintained its loyalty to the GOP after Eugene Lorton's death; it had endorsed the GOP standardbearer in every election since 1940.[16]
