Rival newsrooms consolidate into new digital, print publications

The situation

Individuals at some businesses and community organizations – and often the enterprise itself – seem to hold that change is good as long as it affects someone else. If a community enterprise is going to reach 230 years, it must constantly evaluate – and execute – change.

The York Daily Record and its predecessors, with some gaps, make up that 230-year-old business. And The York Dispatch, a 162-year-old competing newspaper, combined with the YDR late in January, 2026. That combination is another example of transformational change, a structure that offers the combined newsgathering organization a path forward in a difficult media economic environment.

The change includes operational things like finding a place for journalists to work, to be sure. The newspaper moved more than 15 times in the YDR’s long story.

But there’s more to longevity in a business than operational things. There are transformative decisions to make – the types of game-changing decisions that are often the most painful to individuals and, short-term, to the organization.

The witness

To understand the depth of change in York County journalism over the years, it’s productive to explore moments in the same decades in three different centuries – the 90s:

1796: Solomon Meyer, trained in printing at the Seventh Day Baptist Cloister in Ephrata, publishes Die York Gazette in the German language with anti-federalist views. The Democratic Party sympathies stuck with the successors to this newspaper until the symbolic date of 1984, when the York Daily Record endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan.

It’s a wonder that the newspaper survived to spawn successors. Meyer left town amid criticism of his handling finances for the militia unit that he headed. And then his cutting editorial perspective and political shenanigans brought his paper into such disrepute that researcher Walter Klinefelter wrote “that he eventually forsook the publishing business and betook himself elsewhere.”

1892 and 1894: Industrialist A.B. Farquhar operated the York Gazette in the 1890s and made major technological changes – a new steam-operated printing press, for example. He didn’t stop there. He ended publication of the weekly German-language Gazette. That edition of the Gazette dated back to the original Die York Gazette. Its demise showed that York County had transitioned from a German-speaking county to one in which English was the dominant language. At the same time, German-speakers who never mastered English were left without a newspaper and no doubt let The Gazette know about it.

Farquhar also introduced a Sunday edition, an innovation in York County. It was endorsed by York mayor D.K. Noell: “I congratulate you on your enterprise and believe your Sunday edition will be a great success and will exert a good influence in the community.”

That said, pastors protested as the first paper hit the streets on Sept. 16, 1894. The next day, The Gazette published a story headlined, “The Sunday Gazette Denounced in Many Pulpits.“ The Sunday Gazette continued publication until 1909, when the financially troubled newspaper was forced to concentrate on its daily editions. York would be without a Sunday newspaper until Lancaster Newspapers Inc. started the York Sunday News in 1948. Today, the York Daily Record nameplate has replaced the York Sunday News’ each Sunday.

Farquhar’s ownership of the historically Democratic Gazette was a telling sign: He touted his bi-partisanship but ownership of a Democratic newspaper belied that claim.

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1990 and 1996: By 1990, two seven-day newspapers operated in York – the York Daily Record and The York Dispatch/Sunday News. But one county could not support two newspapers, so the owners of the dailies asked the U.S. Justice Department to give its approval to the York Daily Record and The York Dispatch to merge their production, circulation and advertising departments in a joint operating agreement. A JOA is an exception allowed under federal antitrust law. This request came against the backdrop of a vastly changing York Dispatch – innovations that meant abandonment of its 1800s-style front page with narrow headlines and no pictures, popular among many.

An entity called the York Newspaper Co. was created to handle those functions, and the two competitive newsrooms continued to work independently with separate opinion page voices. This arrangement ensured that two editorial voices would exist in York County for the next 35 years. At that time, the JOA expired, and the two newsrooms combined. There was not enough revenue to support two competing newsrooms.

Six years after the JOA was approved, a second event that proved to be transformation took place in the middle of the Blizzard of 1996. The York Daily Record launched the York Digital Record — later YDR.com — in the middle of that memorable storm. The governor ordered all vehicles off Pennsylvania’s roads, and the newspaper entered the digital world by unveiling its site, then under development, bearing weather news.

The site was an early entry by a Pennsylvania newspaper into the digital space and served as the news organization’s flagship digital site 30 years later. The digital prowess growing from this moment gives the newly combined York Daily Record a path forward.

Combined YDR, York Dispatch marks next chapter of long media history

Timeline of the York Daily Record and The York Dispatch

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For the past 20 years, the YDR has been steadily upping its video game. Here’s an example, featuring spotlighting augmented reality as a means of teaching local history. That’s a different form of storytelling from the days in 1796 when a single newspaperman printed the earliest forerunner of the York Daily Record – Die York Gazette, a German-language newspaper.

The questions

This story identifies the willingness to go through transformational change as necessary for private or public community enterprises to last for decades or even centuries. The same could apply to a community. What factors keep this from happening in a community writ large?

Related links: Phil Buckner, former owner of the York Daily Record, has died and Joint operating agreement between YDR, York Dispatch to expire. All photos: York Daily Record. Editor’s note: WitnessingYork.com partner Jim McClure served in top editing positions for the YDR from 1989 to 2019 and was part of the decision-making in some of these moments discussed in this piece. He has researched and written extensively on York County newspaper history.