 The July 27, 2005 front page of The Reporter | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner | Gannett |
| Publisher | Andy Fisher |
| Editor | Katy Macek |
| Founded | 1870 (as theDaily Commonwealth) |
| Headquarters | N6637 Rolling Meadows Drive,Fond du Lac,Wisconsin 54936 United States |
| Circulation | 3,240 (as of 2022)[1] |
| Website | fdlreporter.com |
The Reporter is a dailynewspaper based inFond du Lac, Wisconsin owned byGannett. It serves primarily Fond du Lac and northernDodge County in East CentralWisconsin.
TheReporter traces its founding to August 22, 1870 when theFond du Lac Commonwealth, which had been a weekly newspaper since 1856, began daily circulation. However, the first incarnation of theFond du Lac Daily Reporter did not start until 1883, when L. A. Lange founded a new newspaper for Fond du Lac to compete with theCommonwealth, publishing Monday through Saturday. This was the first paper to have atelegraph line in the Fond du Lac area, giving it a slight advantage over competing papers, with most eventually folding during the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1917, L. A. Lange was succeeded by his son A. H. Lange, as publisher of theDaily Reporter, beginning a tradition of Lange family involvement with operations throughout the rest of the 20th century.
In 1926, theFond du Lac Daily Commonwealth andFond du Lac Daily Reporter merged to become theFond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter. Its offices and presses were located at 18 West First Street. It would continue to be known as such until the 1970s, when "Commonwealth" was dropped from thenameplate. In the mid-1920s, theCommonwealth Reporter took ownership ofradio stationKFIZ, and launched the short-livedKFIZ-TV (channel 34) from 1970 until 1972.
In 1970, the paper was sold toThomson Newspapers, which erected a new building at the corner of West Second and Macy Streets in Fond du Lac. It was also during this time that the Saturday evening edition of the paper was switched to a Sunday morning delivery.
In 1998 and 1999, a nearly 60,000-square-foot (5,600 m2) addition was added to the present building to increase printing operations. In 2000, Thomson sold their newspaper interests toGannett to concentrate on financial news and data. The additional press capacity was then used to print publications for nearby sister newspaperThe Sheboygan Press, after that publication's older presses at their Sheboygan facilities broke down in mid-1998, and were judged to be too obsolete to repair.
Gannett eventually downsized their Fond du Lac operations upon the 2009 purchase of the parent company ofAction Advertiser, a localshopper paper which also did contract publishing, moving out of downtown to an expansion of theAction Advertiser offices near theI-41/WI 23 interchange on September 20, 2009. This necessitated the move ofThe Reporter from publishing in-house to out of Gannett'sAppleton facilities for thePost-Crescent, with theOshkosh Northwestern also following suit. Publication ofSheboygan Press subsequently moved to Milwaukee under a contract with theMilwaukee Journal Sentinel until 2014, whenPress publications were also printed out of Appleton (Gannett purchased theJournal Sentinel in April 2016; that latter paper now publishes all state Gannett publications as of the spring of 2018 when the Appleton printing facility was made redundant and closed down, includingThe Reporter).
As of 2015, the operations ofAction Advertiser andThe Reporter are branded together asAction Reporter Media.
