Fort Myers News-Press

About Fort Myers News-Press

The News-Press is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Fort Myers, Florida, serving primarily Lee County as well as parts of Hendry, Collier, and Charlotte counties in Southwest Florida. Founded in 1884 as the Fort Myers Press, it is the oldest continuously operating business in Southwest Florida and one of the oldest newspapers in the state. The paper is currently owned by the USA Today Co., the corporate successor in the Gannett newspaper family, which has owned it since 1971. Its website is news-press.com. The News-Press has never missed an edition in its more than 140 years of publication, a record it maintained through two world wars, the Great Depression, and numerous hurricanes. Its founding story, involving a newspaperman diverted to Fort Myers aboard a two-masted schooner, is among the most colorful origin tales in American journalism.

A kidnapped newspaperman

The paper's story began in the fall of 1884, when Stafford Cleveland, a New York newspaperman, sailed south in the Gulf of Mexico aboard a two-masted schooner called the Lily White. Cleveland intended to start a newspaper in Fort Ogden, a settlement up the Peace River near Arcadia, and he carried his printing equipment with him. The schooner's skipper, Henry L. Roan, was from an obscure outpost on the Caloosahatchee River named Fort Myers, a remote cow town of ramshackle wooden buildings with just 349 residents.

Roan sailed past Charlotte Harbor and, in the telling that has become local legend, essentially shanghaied Cleveland and his printing equipment to Fort Myers instead. With the help of the townfolk, Roan convinced Cleveland that Fort Myers, not Fort Ogden, was the place to start a paper. Whether the diversion was a kidnapping or merely a forceful persuasion remains an open question in local histories, but the result was the founding of the Fort Myers Press, which debuted as a weekly on November 22, 1884.

The early years under Stafford Cleveland

The first issue of the Fort Myers Press declared itself a journal devoted to the interests of South Florida. Cleveland, the paper's founder and first editor, wrote about race relations, the environment, and mosquito control, and he announced plans to write what he called weekly Letters to Northern Friends, dispatches aimed at informing potential settlers and investors about the Florida frontier.

Cleveland died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, just a year after founding the paper. His wife then took over the publication, launching a tradition of women in management at the paper that would recur throughout its history. The founder's name lives on in Cleveland Avenue, the major road that forms the heart of Lee County's commercial corridor.

Becoming a daily and the News-Press name

The paper became a daily in 1911, when it was called The Press, reflecting Fort Myers' growth in the early twentieth century as the region developed around cattle, citrus, and winter tourism. The arrival of the railroad and the growing fame of Fort Myers as the winter home of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford gave the paper a expanding community to cover.

In 1931, the paper merged with its rival, the Tropical News, to become The News-Press. The merger consolidated the Fort Myers daily newspaper market during the Great Depression, a period when many small papers failed. The combined paper carried forward the 1884 founding date as the origin of its institutional lineage, making it Southwest Florida's oldest business.

Gannett ownership since 1971

In 1971, the Gannett Company purchased The News-Press, beginning a corporate ownership that has now lasted more than half a century. When Gannett bought the paper, its in-house publication profiled the newest addition to the company's growing stable of newspapers. The acquisition placed the News-Press within what was then the largest newspaper chain in the United States by circulation.

Under Gannett, the paper became known within the company as a testing ground for new ideas. Its vice president and executive editor in the 2000s described the paper as Gannett's petri dish, where the company tried out innovations in print and digital journalism before rolling them out to other properties. The paper is now owned by the USA Today Co., the corporate successor in the Gannett family.

A record of never missing an edition

Through hurricanes, floods, oil crises, and paper shortages, The News-Press never missed an edition, a record that stood for more than a century. The paper's slogan, Every Morning, 365 Days a Year, captured the institutional commitment behind that record. Early account books from the 1920s even recorded subscribers paying their accounts in chickens, a reminder of the frontier economy in which the paper operated.

The production history of the paper reflects the industrial scale of twentieth-century newspapering. After Gannett bought the paper in 1971, the printing operation was upgraded with new presses in 1973 and 1979, massive machines capable of producing 60,000 copies an hour. For decades the paper was printed at its Fort Myers plant before production was moved, first to Naples and then, in May 2021, to Stuart, Florida, where it is printed alongside the Naples Daily News.

Coverage area and editions

The News-Press serves primarily Lee County, including Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, Lehigh Acres, and North Fort Myers, as well as parts of Hendry, Collier, and Charlotte counties. The paper has published several editions of its Local and State metro section tailored to suburban communities, recognizing the distinct identities of the region's fast-growing cities.

The paper's website carries special sections on topics of particular importance to Southwest Florida, including education, the environment, and growth and development. Environmental coverage has been a long-standing emphasis, continuing the interest of founder Stafford Cleveland in the region's natural surroundings, and the paper reports extensively on water quality, development pressures, and the health of the Caloosahatchee River and its estuaries.

Circulation and the modern paper

Recent reporting on the state of Florida's newspapers placed the paper's average print circulation at about 9,850, with roughly 1,238 digital subscribers, figures that illustrate the profound contraction of print readership since the paper's twentieth-century peak, when daily circulation approached 100,000. The paper's headquarters are at 4415 Metro Parkway in Fort Myers.

The paper is led by publisher William Barker and editor Cindy McCurry-Ross. As part of the USA Today Co. chain, it combines local reporting from its Fort Myers newsroom with national and state coverage from wire services and corporate sister publications, including USA Today itself.

Anniversaries and institutional memory

The paper has marked its major anniversaries with retrospectives on its own history, including a 130th anniversary in 2014 and a 140th anniversary in 2024. These commemorations have recounted the Lily White story, the paper's survival through wars and hurricanes, and the generations of journalists, press operators, and carriers who produced it.

Production employees with decades of service have been among the keepers of the paper's institutional memory, including second-generation press workers who grew up around the Fort Myers plant. The red leather-bound accounting ledgers of the 1920s, the three-story presses, and the unbroken run of daily editions form a tangible heritage that the paper has celebrated even as production moved out of Fort Myers.

Role in Southwest Florida

As the oldest business in Southwest Florida, The News-Press has documented the region's transformation from a frontier cow town of 349 souls into a metropolitan area of more than three-quarters of a million residents. Its archives record the railroad era, the land booms and busts, the postwar tourism explosion, and the twenty-first century's battles over growth and water.

The paper's unbroken publishing record, maintained since November 22, 1884, stands as a singular achievement in American journalism. From Stafford Cleveland's Letters to Northern Friends to the digital editions of the present day, The News-Press has served as the daily chronicle of the Caloosahatchee valley for more than 140 years.