Pulitzer Inc history

Under the rules of the Pulitzer trust established in 1950, the firm's stock could only be sold for the amount it was acquired, not the current market value.

1951: The St Louis Star-Times is acquired.

Under a 1961 agency agreement, which allowed competing newspapers to share printing and other facilities so that both could stay in business, the Post-Dispatch was St Louis's afternoon and Sunday newspaper, while the Globe-Democrat was the morning paper and produced a weekend edition.

In 1963 the drama jury nominated Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but the board found the script insufficiently "uplifting," a complaint that related to arguments over sexual permissiveness and rough dialogue.

In 1968, the firm bought part of KVOA-TV in Tucson, Arizona.

Under United States Department of Justice rules, it had to sell that interest in 1971 when it bought the Tucson Daily Star for $10 million.

In 1974, Pulitzer bought WOW-TV in Nebraska from the Meredith Corporation.

In 1979, the Pulitzer Company took over the advertising, circulation, accounting, and promotion of the St Louis Globe-Democrat under their agency agreement.

In 1981, it traded KSDK-TV St Louis to Multimedia for stations in Greenville, South Carolina, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In 1983, Pulitzer bought UHF television stations in Louisville and Fort Wayne, Indiana, from Gannett.

Seeking to expand, in 1985 Pulitzer bought the Lerner Newspapers chain of 52 small local Chicago weeklies for $9.1 million.

By mid-1986, Pulitzer Publishing agreed to buy the 22 percent stake held by four family members for $95 million.

In 1988, Pulitzer invested millions in machinery to automatically handle rolls of paper and on computer layout and composition equipment.

In the fall of 1989, Pulitzer faced its first real challenge in years on its home turf in St Louis.

The moves were not enough, however, and in mid-1992, Pulitzer announced it would shut down Lerner if it did not find a buyer by October 1992.

1993; publisher of the Post-Dispatch for 38 years), funds the St Louis-based Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

The board typically exercised its broad discretion in 1997, the 150th anniversary of Pulitzer's birth, in two fundamental respects.

As such, Pulitzer announced in 1998 that its radio and television holdings would be merged into Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. in a $1.85 billion deal.

1999: The company's television and radio stations are merged into Hearst-Argyle Television Inc.; the newspaper business is spun off as Pulitzer Inc.

Operating revenues were rising steadily and operating income increased by 91 percent over the previous year in 2002.

In 2005, the investigative reporting award went to Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon, for its exposure of a former governor's long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl.

In 2007, the music prize went to Ornette Coleman for "Sound Grammar," the first live jazz recording to win the award.

For 2011, the Plan of Award was revised to encourage more explicitly the entry of online and multimedia material, with the board seeking to honor the best work in whatever form is the most effective.

And for 2012, the board adopted an all-digital entry and judging system, replacing the historic reliance on submission of scrapbooks.