
King invested his own money in the paper, purchasing the first power press in the Midwest. He declared the Sentinel an antislavery paper and also supported temperance legislation. ĭue largely to King's connections to the East, the quality of the Sentinel greatly improved. It was his suggestion that made the Sentinel the first paper in the Midwest to employ newsboys to boost street sales. In June 1845 King came to Milwaukee and became the Sentinel 's editor three months later. 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. Weed recommended his associate editor and protégé, Rufus King. The King years Īfter 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. Lapham, a Midwestern naturalist who later helped establish the National Weather Service. Fillmore employed a succession of editors, including Jason Downer, later a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, and Increase A. 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. The paper finally began to prosper and establish itself as a major political force in the nascent state of Wisconsin. Keeler and Fillmore trumped his efforts by turning their Sentinel into a daily on December 9, 1844, while still publishing a weekly edition. president Millard Fillmore) and succeeded in ousting Starr, who kept publishing his own version of the Sentinel. Keeler, who paid off the paper's creditors. Heavily in debt, he secured the partnership of David M. Starr guarded the Sentinel's position as the sole Whig organ in Milwaukee. Reed later became a " carpetbag" governor of Florida during Reconstruction. The next year he sold the Sentinel to Elisha Starr, an editor who had founded a new Whig paper in response to the Sentinel's Democratic lapse. Only after the Democrats' successful election of Dodge for Congress was Reed able to regain control of the paper. In financial straits, Reed lost control of the paper in 1841 when Democrats foreclosed on the Sentinel's mortgaged debt and took over its editorial page. When Doty backed William Henry Harrison, the Sentinel endorsed Harrison for president in the 1840 election. In 1840 Reed was assaulted by individuals whom the Sentinel charged were hired by Democratic Governor Henry Dodge. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Whig party in the territory thrust the Sentinel into partisan politics. 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. 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. A deathly ill O'Rourke struggled to help the paper to find its feet before he died six months later of tuberculosis at the age of 24. It was first published as a four-page weekly on June 27, 1837. The 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. The Milwaukee Sentinel was founded 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. The merged paper's volume and edition numbers follow those of the Journal. Grant listed below their respective newspapers' flags. The legacies of both papers are acknowledged on the editorial pages today, with the names of the Sentinel 's Solomon Juneau and the Journal 's Lucius Nieman and Harry J.

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". In early 2003, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel began printing operations at its new printing facility in West Milwaukee. The new Journal Sentinel then became a seven-day morning paper. The Journal Sentinel was first printed on Sunday, April 2, 1995, following the consolidation of operations between the afternoon The Milwaukee Journal and the morning Milwaukee Sentinel, which had been owned by the same company, Journal Communications, for more than 30 years.
