Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a daily morning broadsheet printed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where it is the primary newspaper and also the largest newspaper in the state of Wisconsin, where it is widely read. It was purchased by the Gannett Company in 2016.

In early 2003, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel began printing at a new facility in West Milwaukee. In September 2006, the Journal Sentinel announced it had "signed a five-year agreement to print the national edition of USA Today for distribution in the northern and western suburbs of Chicago and the eastern half of Wisconsin".

The Milwaukee Sentinel was founded on June 27, 1837, in response to disparaging statements made about the east side of town by Byron Kilbourn's westside partisan newspaper, the Milwaukee Advertiser, during the city's "bridge wars", a period when the two sides of town fought for dominance. A co-founder of Milwaukee, Solomon Juneau, provided the starting funds for editor John O'Rourke, a former office assistant at the Advertiser, to start the paper.

On Juneau's request, O'Rourke's associate, Harrison Reed, remained to take over the Sentinel's operations on behalf of Democratic Party politician James Duane Doty. Reed continued the struggle to keep the paper ahead of its debts, often printing pleas to his advertisers and subscribers to pay their bills any way they could. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Whig party in the territory thrust the Sentinel into partisan politics. In 1840 Reed was assaulted by individuals whom the Sentinel charged were hired by Democratic Governor Henry Dodge. When Doty backed William Henry Harrison, the Sentinel endorsed Harrison for president in the 1840 election.

Starr guarded the Sentinel's position as the sole Whig organ in Milwaukee. Heavily in debt, he secured the partnership of David M. Keeler, who paid off the paper's creditors. Keeler took on partner John S. Fillmore (nephew of U.S. president Millard Fillmore) and succeeded in ousting Starr, who kept publishing his own version of the Sentinel. Keeler and Fillmore trumped his efforts by turning their Sentinel into a daily on December 9, 1844, while still publishing a weekly edition. The paper finally began to prosper and establish itself as a major political force in the nascent state of Wisconsin. Having accomplished his goal of establishing the first daily paper in the territory, Keeler retired two months later, but not before opening a public reading room of the nation's newspapers, the origin of Milwaukee's public library system. Fillmore employed a succession of editors, including Jason Downer, later a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, and Increase A. Lapham, a Midwestern naturalist who later helped establish the National Weather Service.

After running through six editors in eight years, Fillmore sought a more stable editorial foundation and went east to confer with Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal and powerful Whig political boss of New York. Weed recommended his associate editor and protégé, Rufus King. King was a native of New York City, a graduate of West Point, a brevet lieutenant, the son of the president of Columbia College and the grandson of U.S. Constitution signer Rufus King. In June 1845 King came to Milwaukee and became the Sentinel's editor three months later.

The paper provided thorough coverage of Wisconsin's constitutional convention, held in Madison in 1846. When the adopted constitution fell short of Whig expectations, the Sentinel was instrumental in encouraging its rejection by territorial voters on April 6, 1847. The Sentinel launched a German-language paper, Der Volksfreund, to bring the city's large population of German immigrants to the Whig cause. Gen. King himself was a delegate to Wisconsin's second constitutional convention. He was also appointed head of the Milwaukee militia and sat on the University of Wisconsin's board of regents, as well as being the first superintendent of Milwaukee public schools. In the wake of the Panic of 1857 King sold the paper to T.D. Jermain and H.H. Brightman, but remained editor, covering the state legislative sessions of 1859–1861 himself.

In 1848, the Sentinel praised the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a treaty that ended the Mexican–American War, commenting: "Peace upon almost any terms will be joyfully welcomed by the American People. They have long since tired of the war."