E. W. Scripps Company
E. W. Scripps Company
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E. W. Scripps Company

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E. W. Scripps Company

The E. W. Scripps Company, also known as Scripps, is an American broadcasting company founded in 1878 as a chain of daily newspapers by Edward Willis "E. W." Scripps and his sister, Ellen Browning Scripps. It was also formerly a media conglomerate. The company is headquartered at the Scripps Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its corporate motto is "Give light and the people will find their own way", which is symbolized by the media empire's longtime lighthouse logo.

In terms of assets owned, Scripps is the third largest operator of ABC affiliates, behind Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group, and ahead of Hearst Television and Tegna. Scripps also owns a number of free-to-air multi-genre digital subchannel multicast networks through its Scripps Networks division, including the Ion Television network and Scripps News.

The company started out in the newspaper business, expanding into radio in the mid-1930s and television in the mid-1940s. It sold off its newspaper holdings in 2014 and exited radio in 2018.

The E. W. Scripps Company was founded as a newspaper company on November 2, 1878, when Edward Willis Scripps published the first issue of the Cleveland Penny Press.

In 1894, Scripps and his half-brother, George H. Scripps, organized their various papers into the first modern newspaper chain. In July 1895, it was named the Scripps-McRae League to reflect the leadership of Cincinnati Post general manager Milton A. McRae, a longtime partner. The company expanded during the decade to publish newspapers in California, Denver, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, and elsewhere.

In early November 1922, the Scripps-McRae League was renamed Scripps-Howard Newspapers to recognize company executive Roy W. Howard. On November 23, the E. W. Scripps Company was incorporated and placed in trust for Scripps' children and grandchildren. The company's shares were divided into two types: Class A Common Shares, which were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and common voting shares, which were not publicly traded and elected a majority of the company's directors (a number of media companies, including the New York Times Company and the Washington Post organization, are governed by this system so that the descendants of the company's founders can keep control of the company). E. W. Scripps died in 1926.

On June 2, 1902, Scripps founded the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), based in Cleveland, Ohio, as a news report service for different Scripps-owned newspapers. It started selling content to non-Scripps owned newspapers in 1907, and by 1909, it became a more general syndicate, offering comics, pictures and features as well. It moved from Cleveland to Chicago in 1915, with an office in San Francisco. NEA rapidly grew and delivered content to 400 newspapers in 1920 and about 700 in 1930. Today, it is the oldest syndicate still in operation.

Scripps created the United Press news agency in 1907 by uniting three smaller syndicates and controlled it until a 1958 merger with William Randolph Hearst's smaller competing agency, INS, to form United Press International. With the Hearst Corporation as a minority partner, UPI continued under Scripps management until it was sold off in 1982. A separate wire service, the Scripps Howard News Service, operated for 96 years from 1917 to 2013.

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