About The Frederick Post

The Frederick Post

The Frederick Post was a daily newspaper published in Frederick, Maryland. It began publication in December 1910 as a competing daily in Frederick, was acquired in 1916 by the company that published its rival, The News, and then spent most of the twentieth century as the morning half of a two-paper operation: The News appeared in the evenings and The Frederick Post in the mornings, under the same family-owned company. That arrangement ended in 2002, when the morning Post and the evening News were merged into a single morning edition, The Frederick News-Post, and the separate Frederick Post title was retired.

The Post's history was therefore unusual. It began as a rival, became a partner under common ownership only a few years later, and then outlasted most American second newspapers by decades, because its owner published it and its former competitor as complementary morning and evening editions rather than as direct competitors. Its disappearance in 2002 was not a collapse; it was a consolidation of two surviving titles into one, in a city whose newspaper had been published by the descendants of its founder since the nineteenth century.

Frederick and Its First Daily, The News

To understand the Post, it is necessary to begin with the paper it was founded to rival. On October 15, 1883, a Frederick printing company first published The News, an evening newspaper founded by William T. Delaplaine. Delaplaine had begun his business career in Frederick in 1880 with a small printing shop and expanded it by establishing The News, described in company history as the first daily newspaper in Frederick. The business was incorporated in June 1888, and the publishing company, Great Southern, remained a family-owned business, passing through generations of the Delaplaine and Randall families.

The News set out, in its first edition, a neutral course in politics, presenting itself as a record of events and opening its columns to the public. It was originally a morning paper published six days a week before it eventually switched to afternoons. By the early twentieth century it was the established daily of Frederick, the seat of Frederick County in western Maryland, a community of farmers, merchants, and manufacturers within reach of both Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

A Rival Morning Paper in 1910

A competing daily newspaper, The Frederick Post, began publication in December 1910. Its appearance gave Frederick, a city of modest size, two daily newspapers, and set up a direct contest for readers and advertisers between the new Post and Delaplaine's established News. The Post's early issues, from 1910 onward, were preserved in newspaper archives, which later cataloged thousands of searchable pages of the Frederick Post from its first years.

The rivalry did not last long as a contest between independent owners. Several years after the Post began, it was purchased by Great Southern, the Delaplaine family company. Trade coverage of the company's 125th anniversary summarized the sequence simply: a quarter-century after The News was founded, the publishing company bought its rival, The Frederick Post. The fuller chronology in the News-Post's own history placed the transaction in 1916, through a business deal by which The News acquired The Frederick Post.

Morning Post, Evening News

From 1916 the two papers were published as a pair. The News was published in the evenings and The Frederick Post in the morning, so that the same company served readers at both ends of the day with separately titled editions. The model resembled the morning-evening combinations common in larger American cities, adapted to a county-seat market: one ownership, one printing establishment, and two mastheads with distinct places in readers' daily routines.

That structure kept the Frederick Post title alive for eighty-six years after its acquisition. Morning readers in Frederick County began their day with the Post, while the evening News carried the same company's journalism into homes later in the day. The arrangement also insulated Frederick from the fate of many two-paper towns, in which the weaker title was closed outright; here, because the two papers were editions of one enterprise rather than enemies, both titles survived together into the twenty-first century.

A Family-Owned Two-Paper Company

The company that published the Post remained in the hands of the founder's descendants. Surviving third-generation members of the family included George Delaplaine and Frances A. Randall, and fourth-generation members took leading roles in the businesses. Publisher George E. Randall, a fourth-generation descendant of William T. Delaplaine, led the company until his death in 2004; his brother, Myron Randall Jr., was then named president and publisher, and William B. Randall, of the fifth generation, joined the company. The publishing firm, Randall Family, LLC, was the owner of record of the combined News-Post in its later years.

Family ownership shaped the papers' reputation for continuity. When the News-Post marked 125 years of publishing in 2008, Editor and Publisher noted that it had never missed printing a regular edition in that span, a record that covered the decades when the morning edition was The Frederick Post. The anniversary coverage reaffirmed the founding vision of a neutral record of events and a duty to defend readers' right to know, principles the company traced to its first edition in 1883 and carried through both of its titles.

The Post in the Community Record

As Frederick's morning newspaper, the Post recorded the ordinary and extraordinary business of Frederick County: local government, courts, schools, agriculture, business, births, marriages, and deaths. Its archive became a principal source for genealogists and local historians, and commercial archives later offered more than 6,000 searchable pages of The Frederick Post, dated from 1910 into the 1970s, under its own title, separate from the archive of the combined News-Post.

The paper's morning position also meant that, for generations, the Post was the edition in which Frederick readers first encountered overnight national and world news, wire reports, and the previous day's late results, while the evening News updated the record. Together the two editions gave a small city the twice-daily news service that, in the era before radio, television, and the internet, was the mark of a fully served newspaper market.

Merger into The Frederick News-Post in 2002

By the start of the twenty-first century, the economics that had already ended most American evening newspapers pressed on the two-edition model. In 2002 the company merged its two papers to create a single morning edition known as The Frederick News-Post. The new Sunday edition, created in October of that year, made the combined paper a true daily, published 365 days a year. The Frederick Post as a separate morning title ended with that merger, ninety-two years after it had begun as an independent rival.

The successor paper retained the combined name, placing News before Post, and continued under the same family ownership from Frederick. It later moved, in April 2008, into a new building with a high-speed six-tower press capable of printing 70,000 copies an hour, and it endured the advertising decline of the late 2000s, including the company's first layoffs in its history in November 2008. Those events belonged to the News-Post era, but they completed the transition the 2002 merger had begun, from two family titles to one.

Survival Through the Twentieth Century

The Post's survival as a separate masthead was itself notable. In most American cities, the weaker of two commonly owned papers was eventually closed or absorbed, and morning-evening pairs steadily disappeared after the Second World War. In Frederick, the pair endured through the whole century, because the two editions were complements produced by one plant rather than competing products. Readers who subscribed to the morning Post and readers who took the evening News were, from the company's standpoint, customers of a single Frederick newspaper enterprise that happened to publish twice a day, and that enterprise's unbroken publication record, extending back to 1883, carried the Post with it to 2002.

Legacy

The Frederick Post was remembered less as a failed competitor than as one half of one of America's most durable small-city newspaper operations. Founded in December 1910, bought by its rival's owners in 1916, published as Frederick's morning paper for the rest of the century, and merged in 2002, it demonstrated how a second title could survive when its owner treated morning and evening editions as partners rather than rivals.

Its name lived on in the second half of The Frederick News-Post, the daily that continued to serve Frederick County, and in the archived pages of the Post itself, which preserved the morning record of Frederick life from 1910 onward for the researchers who continued to consult them.