The Progress Index

History

The paper's roots trace to 1865, but its current moniker came about through the early-1920s merger of the Index-Appeal and the Evening Progress. It was owned by various Petersburg businessmen until 1959, when Thomson Newspapers of Canada purchased it. Thomson owned The Progress-Index until 1997, when it sold it to Times-Shamrock Communications, a privately held media company based in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Its current building, at 15 Franklin St. in downtown Petersburg, was built in 1921, along with what was then a state-of-the-art press. This was before the merger of the two papers into The Index-Appeal & Evening Progress, shortened to The Progress-Index in 1923. In 2014, Times-Shamrock sold The Progress-Index to New Media Investment Group.

The P-I was a "true" afternoon paper Monday through Saturday until 2005, when its production schedule switched to that of a typical morning paper, in that the pages were laid out and prepared for printing the night before. It remained different from other a.m. papers in one respect, in that, Monday through Friday, the press didn't run until the morning of the day the paper came out, at about 9:30. The paper was distributed in the late morning and early afternoon, Monday through Friday, and the Saturday edition was a true morning paper, in that it is printed the night before. The Sunday paper has always been done that way. Normally, the only time the P-I took advantage of the fact that it prints in the morning was on Election Day, when voters are pictured at the polls. Other than that, only exceptional circumstances cause the P-I to print something that happened on the day the paper was distributed.