The Reading Eagle: One Hundred and Fifty Years of a City's Newspaper

On January twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-seven, a new daily newspaper appeared on the streets of Reading. The Reading Eagle was not the city's first paper, but it outlasted all the others, and for the next one hundred and fifty-two years it was the daily record of this city's life, a family-owned institution that the Penn family had nothing to do with but that the city came to think of as its own.

The Eagle started as an afternoon paper and stayed afternoon through much of its history, printing Monday through Saturday with a Sunday morning edition added later. In nineteen forty, the Eagle's owners acquired the Reading Times, the city's morning paper, though the two remained editorially separate for more than forty years. They were finally combined in nineteen eighty-two, and in two thousand two the Times ceased publication entirely, leaving the Eagle as the sole daily voice.

John Updike worked there as a copyboy in the early nineteen fifties, spending summer breaks absorbing the newspaper craft and writing some feature pieces. He was already headed for Harvard and then New York and then literary fame; the Eagle was one stop in a formation that ended up elsewhere.

For its first hundred and fifty years, the Eagle was controlled by the same founding family, a continuity rare in American journalism by the twenty-first century. That continuity ended in crisis. After celebrating its sesquicentennial of local ownership and editorial control in twenty eighteen, the paper filed for bankruptcy protection in March twenty nineteen and was acquired by Denver-based MediaNews Group shortly after.

The Eagle still publishes. Local ownership and local news are not the same thing they were in eighteen sixty-seven, but the paper that started as an afternoon sheet in a Pennsylvania railroad city is still there, still covering Berks County, carrying a name that has meant something to this place for over a century and a half.