Rahul Sharma (Editor)

The Boston Post

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Type
  
Daily newspaper

Founded
  
1831

Ceased publication
  
1956

Format
  
Broadsheet

Language
  
English

The Boston Post

Owner(s)
  
Post Publishing Company

The Boston Post was a daily newspaper in New England for over a hundred years before it folded in 1956. The Post was founded in November 1831 by two prominent Boston businessmen, Charles G. Greene and William Beals.

Contents

Edwin Grozier bought the paper in 1891. Within two decades, he had built it into easily the largest paper in Boston and New England. He passed it to his son, Richard, upon his death in 1924. Under the younger Grozier, The Boston Post grew into one of the largest newspapers in the country. At its height in the 1930s, it had a circulation of well over a million readers. At the same time, Richard Grozier suffered an emotional breakdown from the death of his wife in childbirth from which he never recovered.

Throughout the 1940s, facing increasing competition from the Hearst-run papers in Boston and New York and from radio and television news, the paper began a decline from which it never recovered.

When it ceased publishing in October 1956, its daily circulation was 255,000 and Sunday circulation approximately 260,000.

In 2017 some publishers are planning to start The Boston Post starting with www.thebostonpost.com, digital version.

Former contributors

  • Olin Downes, music critic.
  • Richard Frothingham, Jr., a Massachusetts historian, journalist, and politician who was a proprietor and managing editor of The Boston Post.
  • Kenneth Roberts
  • Olga Van Slyke Owens Huckins, literary editor, 1941 to 1954. Huckins letter to Rachel Carson inspired the book Silent Spring.

    • Sunday Magazine

    Appearing in the Sunday paper every week was a weekly magazine. It was called first The Sunday Magazine of The Boston Sunday Post and later The Boston Sunday Post Sunday Magazine.

    Pulitzer Prizes

  • 1921 – Meritorious Public Service. The Boston Post was awarded the Pulitzer prize for its investigation and exposure of Charles Ponzi's financial fraud. Ponzi was first exposed by the investigative work directed by Richard Grozier (then acting publisher) and longtime city editor Edward Dunn, long time city editor, after complaints by Bostonians that the returns Ponzi offered were "too good to be true". It was the first time that a Boston paper had won a Pulitzer, and would be the last Pulitzer won for public service awarded to a Boston paper until the Globe won it in 2003.

    • Boston Post cane tradition

    In 1909, under the savvy ownership of Edwin Grozier, the Boston Post engaged in its most famous publicity stunt. The paper had several hundred ornate, gold-tipped canes made and contacted the selectmen in New England's largest towns. The Boston Post Canes were given to the selectmen and presented in a ceremony to the town's oldest living man. The custom was expanded to include a community's oldest women in 1930. Many towns in New England still carry on the Boston Post cane tradition with the original canes they were awarded in 1909.

    References

    The Boston Post Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA