The Huntsville Times

The Huntsville Times served the city of Huntsville and the state for more than 100 years. Among notable editorials and stories, the Times took a stand against Gov. George Wallace‘s plan to close public schools to avoid integration, and it broke the story that James Earl Ray planned to plead guilty in the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and accept a 99-year sentence. In 2012, the paper was merged with the Birmingham News and Mobile Press-Register under the online banner Al.com, overseen by the Alabama Media Group of Newhouse Media.

Old Times Building The Times was launched as the Huntsville Daily Times by Jacob Emory Pierce in 1910. Pierce filled multiple roles, from editor and business manager to reporter and office boy, and his wife, Nannie, served as president. The Times reported on such events as World War I and posted news stories on a billboard in front of the Times’s original building on Holmes Avenue and Greene Street. As the staff increased, Pierce saw the need for better production facilities. In 1928, he constructed a new 12-story building, topped with a penthouse, that at the time was Huntsville’s tallest structure. Now known as the Old Times Building, it is an art-deco facility that serves commercial clients and has earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1931, during the Great Depression, Pierce defaulted on loans, losing ownership of both the paper and the building. In this first management turnover, the Birmingham News bought the Times at auction. In 1935, a Memphis jury convicted Pierce on charges of fraud and impersonating a government official arising from his work for a different newspaper. Pierce testified he had been selling newspaper advertisements to residents of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee who backed the Tennessee Valley Authority, but others claimed he tried to sell TVA stock. Pierce died in 1952 and was buried at Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville.

The Times flourished under the ownership of the Birmingham News. Reese Amis joined the staff in 1931 and removed the “Daily” in the newspaper’s name because it had never been published daily. He was hailed as “legendary” in the Times’s centennial issue for the 27 years he served as both editor and publisher. Advance Publications’s S.I. Newhouse Newspaper Division bought the Times in 1955, and the newspaper moved to a new building the following year. In 1958, the Times published an extra edition to celebrate Explorer 1, the first satellite launched by the U.S. space program. The booster that carried it into space was a four-stage Juno rocket built under the direction of German scientist Wernher von Braun at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal. The first Saturday edition appeared in 1960 and circulation reached 35,000 by 1962.

In 1963, the Times published editorials in opposition to Alabama governor George Wallace’s order to close public schools rather than integrate them, an action aimed at stopping the scheduled entry of four African American students into Huntsville city schools. In 1969, the Times scored its biggest news scoop when reporter Chris Bell broke the story about James Earl Ray’s plan to plead guilty in the shooting death of Martin Luther King Jr. after getting a vital tip from Alabama author and journalist William Bradford Huie, a neighbor in the nearby town of Hartselle.

The Times’s growth continued into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with Sunday-delivery subscriptions rising from 65,000 copies in the early 1970s to 80,000 in 1996. In addition, the Times building underwent a $25 million expansion in 1989 to add a new printing press and distribution center and to renovate the office space for the news, advertising, and circulation departments.

In March 1993, reporter Deborah Storey published a story about the plight of a friend who died of AIDS. The woman had contracted HIV in a sexual relationship with a man who never told her he carried it. Storey maintained a close relationship with her subject, a former high school classmate, throughout her two-year struggle and ultimate death. Storey’s article drew a passionate response from others who been infected the same way or by the same person and ultimately led to the passage of legislation in the state criminalizing knowing exposure of others to the HIV virus and requiring disclosure from those infected with HIV to sexual partners.

In March 1998, a Times series on the pollution of the Tennessee River, titled “The River Defiled,” won the Earth Society Foundation’s first media award. In 2002, Melinda Gorham became the first woman appointed managing editor. In 2004, the Times, which had been produced as an afternoon newspaper, shifted to morning publication. In 2012, Newhouse reduced the Times from a seven-day-a-week print publication schedule to Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday only and essentially merged its three newspapers under the Alabama Media Group and its online presence, Al.com. The changes were made in response to a general decline in newspaper revenues across the nation; indeed, the Times’s circulation fell 15 percent from five years earlier. On February 26, 2023, the last print editions of all three newspapers were published. Thereafter, all news was published digitally at Al.com.

Additional Resources

“The Times of Our Lives: The Centennial Edition of The Huntsville Times,” Huntsville Times, March 21, 2010.

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