The Jersey Journal commemorated its 11th birthday in 1878 with a note about its prospects: “Yesterday the Evening Journal entered on the 12th year of its existence and is, we are happy to say, in vigorous health, and has a good prospect of long continued and useful life.”
It wasn’t wrong. The Journal would go on to celebrate its own 100th and 150th anniversaries, on each occasion recapping its origin story and history. It did the same in 2002 when it nearly closed.
This time will be the last occasion upon which the history is written in the publication itself. The Jersey Journal’s conclusion today is the final page in the final chapter of its 157-year history.
It’s a history that will forever be intertwined with the county it documented through times that included the opening of the tunnels into New York City, the infamous career of political boss and eight-term Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, the establishment of the haven that is Liberty State Park, the Twin Towers rising, the Twin Towers falling, the devastation of Superstorm Sandy and thousands of high school sporting events and political skirmishes in between.
It is a period longer than any individual could have experienced in its entirety, but in which countless individuals contributed to making The Journal a success.
So let’s start, as all proper stories should, at the beginning, in 1867 with the entrepreneurial spirits of Maj. Z.K. Pangborn and Capt. William B. Dunning.
It was two years after the Civil War’s conclusion, and the two men had emerged as veterans set on seeing a United States in which Black Americans were endowed with equal rights.
Pangborn, born in Vermont, had lived the life of a school principal, newspaper editor and Army paymaster before arriving in Jersey City in 1865 in his mid-30s. Dunning brought printing experience to the partnership.
Together, they published the first edition of The Evening Journal on May 2, 1867, its four pages packed with tales of a bar fight, a stalled state law on voting rights for Black men, ads for hat and shoe stores and a snarky response to an apparent misjudgment by the New York Gazette: “There is little probability that the new daily paper at Jersey City, projected by Major Pangborn and others, will be established.”
The Evening Journal’s response?
“The bohemians of the Gazette were about as incorrect in their statement about our business as they usually are in their items of New Jersey News. By studying and copying the news from the columns of the Evening Journal, they will be able, in the future, to avoid making blundering reports of matters in Jersey.”
The business found immense success in its first year, trumping the circulation of Jersey City’s two other primary newspapers.
The Journal team initially worked out of two rooms at 13 Exchange Place with a hand press, upgrading to a power press after two years printing papers at 158 Greene St.
After the operation’s first year, the Dear family commenced its long, multigenerational involvement in the paper when Joseph A. Dear purchased an interest in the company.
The 28-year-old was born in England and had arrived in the U.S. four years prior, settling in Jersey City the same year the paper launched. He had held writing and reporting gigs, including at the competing Jersey City Times, before joining The Evening Journal.
After Dear’s death in 1908, his son, Joseph A. Dear II, took over as editor. He renamed the paper The Jersey Journal the following year, on Oct. 6, 1909.
A gruesome murder and Jersey City’s growth were among the major headlines of the newspaper’s first few decades.
The Journal extensively covered the 1878 “slaughtered in his sleep” murder of a Jersey City police officer, Richard H. Smith, who was found bloodied in his bed, through its multiple trials of his wife, Jennie Smith, and family acquaintance Cove Bennett. The sensationalized mystery was never solved.
Successive headlines announcing the initial incident were as dramatic as it gets: “Midnight Murder,” “His Wife Asleep By His Side” and “Chloroform and the Dagger.”
The happier occasion of the opening of Hudson County Boulevard, now Kennedy Boulevard, was documented in 1895. The first throughway connecting the whole county was welcomed with a bicycle parade.
The newspaper’s headquarters changed frequently as its operations grew. The building that still bears its name in Journal Square wasn’t its first in the neighborhood — it moved into a custom-built brick building on Bergen and Sip avenues in 1912 — but the new building that opened in 1925 would be the paper’s home for 89 years.
When The Journal moved into the neighborhood, Journal Square was far from a business center. But Walter M. Dear, the newspaper’s business manager, sensed that it would become one because of forthcoming transit projects. He was right.
He also likely envisioned the area bearing his newspaper’s name, much as the New York Herald and New York Times had “squares” in Manhattan, said Colin Egan, a local historian.
That vision officially came to fruition in the 1920s, first with the neighboring Summit Avenue Tube Station being renamed Journal Square Station in 1925, and the plaza being designated Journal Square on March 9, 1926.
“It is fundamental that transportation facilities build up any community, and the growth of Journal Square is a convincing demonstration of this fact,” Walter M. Dear said in an address recorded in the newspaper in December 1926. “This means that more people will continually locate in Journal Square, and that they will bring increasing business to the local section. Journal Square has ‘arrived.’”
The publication would experience two major lasting changes in the next 15 years.
First, members of its staff joined a union, the new Hudson County Newspaper Guild, founded in 1934 and affiliated with what was then called the Newspaper Guild of America.
Second, Samuel I. Newhouse entered the picture, gradually acquiring control of The Journal from the Dear family through the 1940s. Advance Publications, the Newhouse family company, would remain the newspaper’s owner for its final 75 years.
Newhouse, who grew up in Bayonne, began his newspaper career as a teenager at the Bayonne Times. Many years later, he bought the Times and merged it into The Journal.
The Journal continued to grow through most of the 20th century, buying the Times in 1971 and then the 117-year-old Hudson Dispatch 20 years later. It also launched a Spanish-language weekly newspaper, El Nuevo Hudson, in 1995.
The newspaper always had a flair for writing about corruption, a necessity borne out of the fact that Hudson County politics has always had a flair for corruption. So infamous was Hudson County corruption that two-term Gov. Brendan Byrne’s favorite line was that he wanted to be buried in Hudson so he could continue to vote after his demise.
Whether it was Boss Hague, the Hudson Eight, William Musto or Operation Bid Rig, The Journal didn’t shy away. At one point, stories about politicians being charged or convicted were so frequent that Journal readers woke up on Oct. 15, 1982, to a headline that shockingly read: “No Hudson County officials indicted yesterday.”
Still, it wasn’t just corruption that made news in The Journal. When Jersey City was rocked by what would be known as the “Black Tom” explosion in 1916, The Journal was there. When Jackie Robinson made his debut in organized baseball in Jersey City in 1946, The Journal was there.
A history of The Journal would be incomplete without noting the role it played as a leader of the community.
It didn’t just editorialize about the importance of education but worked to support it by sponsoring the county’s annual spelling bee and science fair as well as recognition ceremonies for Women of Achievement and Everyday Heroes.
By 1992, the year after it absorbed the Hudson Dispatch, The Journal boasted a readership of 42% of all adults in Hudson and Southeast Bergen counties. But print journalism had peaked, and within 10 years, the newspaper would be on the brink of closing.
Blaming falling circulation and ad revenue, ownership set a closure date of Feb. 1, 2002, unless the unions — by then there were three: newsroom, office staff and delivery workers — agreed to cut half of their staff. Last-minute deals saved the paper, although jobs were lost.
“I remember the night editors sitting around two computer monitors with two front pages, one saying we closed and another saying we survived,” said Managing Editor Ron Zeitlinger, who was one of the night editors at the time. “We were holding the press for that one page. We were getting updates on the negotiations all night — it could have gone either way. Needless to say, we were ecstatic.”
With the help of improved technology, The Journal evolved and kept readers in the know within minutes of a major event with nimble, accurate reports on NJ.com/Hudson, followed by more in-depth coverage in the following day’s paper.
The newspaper said farewell to Journal Square in 2014, first in favor of a smaller, more modern office in Secaucus and then another on Montgomery Street in Jersey City, not far from its original Downtown home.
Despite new challenges after the turn of the millennium, the newspaper always managed to punch above its weight.
The Journal tirelessly covered many local watershed moments, such as the election of Jersey City’s first Black mayor, Glenn D. Cunningham, as well as moments with national and global impact, including Superstorm Sandy and the 9/11 attacks.
While others in the region were running home to be with family on Sept. 11, 2001, Journal reporters and editors — and anyone else at the paper who could push a noun against a verb — were racing to work.
“FOREVER CHANGED,” the Sept. 12, 2001, cover, was the result of the first of many days of resolute but grief-stricken reporting from a county that lost 155 of its own residents in the tragic attack.
Cunningham’s election earlier that year, meanwhile, led to several years of coverage of his administration and ascent to the state Senate as well as his sudden death in 2004.
In The Journal’s final decade, the newspaper documented the COVID-19 pandemic as staff quarantined at home, venturing out to capture the upturned society from behind face masks. The Journal offered the latest information on available testing sites, school reopenings and the immense relief ushered in by federal approval of COVID vaccines.
Coverage of the pandemic and other events, along with stellar photography and page designs, helped The Journal earn top prize for two of the past three years in the New Jersey Press Association’s annual competition for daily newspapers.
In the first edition of The Evening Journal, the editors dedicated half a column to introducing their product and mission. The newspaper would be reliable and prompt in its news reporting and fearless and independent in its opinions, they wrote, aiming to “help each of its readers to grow daily richer, wiser, better and happier.” Should The Journal succeed at providing that service, “an intelligent and appreciative public will accord to it all the countenance and support which it will deserve — and this is all it asks.”
The 157 years that followed serve as evidence of how wholly and continuously the community embraced that pact. As it predicted back in 1878, The Journal has indeed had a long continued and useful life.