
This transformation is perhaps the most dramatic in the newspaper's long history, but the paper has had to adapt to changes in the economy, information technology, and society many times. The newspaper also has had many name changes and is often just called the Register. The paper has been home to reporters, editors, and owners who were important leaders in journalism, education, arts, and politics in Alabama and the nation.
The Register traces its beginnings to the Mobile Gazette and the Mobile Commercial Register. James Lyon, son of an American Revolutionary War hero, founded the Gazette and many other papers in the early days of the United States. He began printing the Gazette soon after the United States took control of Mobile from Spain in April 1813.
Jonathan Battelle and John W. Townsend started the Mobile Commercial Register in 1821. The following year, the two men purchased the Gazette. In 1828 Thaddeus Sanford bought the Register and greatly improved the paper and expanded its influence. Sanford is often overlooked by historians, but his many financial investments made him a leader in Alabama business and society. He also became a leader in the Democratic Party at a time when editors served as the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as party headquarters. Sanford used his newspaper to voice his support of slavery but opposition to secession.


In 1882, Rapier hired Erwin B. Craighead to direct the expanding news coverage of the Register. Within a few years, Craighead became the vice president of the paper and also took over as chief editorial writer. For the next 28 years, many Mobilians thought of Craighead as the voice of the newspaper. Craighead championed a number of reforms, many of them lead by his wife Lura, that included the placement of delinquent teens in a detention home instead of jail. On the issue of race, Craighead's views reflected white paternalism toward African Americans.
The widening scope of news required the work of many writers. For the most part, white men filled these jobs. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the paper employed a number of white women, including Anne Bozeman Lyon, who wrote short stories with a regional flavor. The Register also employed the talents of some African American writers as special correspondents, including A. F. Owens, a minister who edited the Baptist Pioneer and who also wrote for papers in Montgomery and Birmingham.
Frederick I. Thompson, an Alabama media baron, bought the Register in 1910. Within a few years, he also acquired the Mobile Item and the Alabama Journal in Montgomery. With former Gov. Braxton Bragg Comer and his brother Donald Comer, head of Avondale Mills,Thompson bought the Birmingham Age-Herald. He also bought the Tri-Cities Daily, which covered Florence, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia, and owned stock in newspapers and magazines outside Alabama. Under Thompson, the Register pushed for railroad regulations, public ownership of the docks at the Port of Mobile, and an end to convict leasing.

By the early 1960s, the aging Chandler was in failing health, walked with the help of a cane, and was suffering from emphysema; he would die in 1970. Direction of the Mobile Press-Register increasingly fell on William J. Hearin, general manager since 1944, a member of the board of directors, and executive vice president of the company. In 1965, the directors named him co-publisher, and he took control of the daily operation of the newspaper. In 1966, the board of directors sold the newspaper for $27 million to Samuel I. Newhouse, the son of a poor immigrant who was building the largest privately owned newspaper chain in the United States. He had already purchased the Birmingham News and the Huntsville Times and News. The new ownership of the Press-Register brought no change in the news operation of the paper. Newhouse considered newspapering a business and concerned himself with that side of the enterprise, leaving news matters to Hearin.
Beginning around the end of World War II, the newspaper's management began emphasizing cutting costs, particularly labor costs, which were rising faster than revenues. Hearin increasingly automated production of the newspaper where he could, adding computers to advertising, newsroom, typesetting, circulation, and mechanical operations. But structural changes taking place in the communications market were causing the Press-Register and other newspapers to lose readers and advertisers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, major dailies throughout the nation began their first layoffs of news staff in decades, abandoned publication of separate afternoon editions, or merged with competing papers.
In the hope of revitalizing the Press-Register, the Newhouse newspaper group hired Howard Bronson as publisher in 1992. Bronson added more editors, reporters, and other staff who improved the quality of the paper's news gathering and writing. A series of editorials advocating reform of the Alabama Constitution earned the paper a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. In 2002, after more than a half century on Government Street, the Press-Register moved into sprawling, modern headquarters on Water Street.

By this time, the Newhouse owners had decided that the future of their news operations would be digital as well. The owners replaced Bronson with veteran publisher Ricky Mathews in 2009 to lead the Press-Register and other Newhouse papers in Alabama through the transition and manage the newspapers' decline as Newhouse built up its online business. (Matthews would later chair the Alabama Coastal Recovery Commission following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.) Newhouse announced in May 2012 that it would combine all three Alabama newspapers into a single online version, Al.com. Starting in the fall of that year, the individual papers would publish print editions only on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. This change marked the end of the Press-Register's 180 years of daily publication. The digital operations needed far fewer people than did the printed newspapers and they required staffers with entirely different skills. The Press-Register laid off a total of 187 reporters, photographers, editors, ad salesmen, clerks, page designers, production staff, and others. All told, Newhouse cut about 400 employees across the state.

The Alabama Media Group expanded online news-gathering efforts to 24 hours a day and seven days a week and reduced print newspaper publication to a three-day-a-week schedule. The newspapers were home-delivered and sold in stores on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays only until February 26, 2023, when the last print editions were published. Thereafter, all news was published digitally at Al.com.
Additional Resources
Burnett, Lonnie A. The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Additional Resources
Burnett, Lonnie A. The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Logan, Andy. The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons: The Story of William D'Alton Mann: War Hero, Profiteer, Inventor, and Blackmailer Extraordinary. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Meeker, Richard H. Newspaperman: S. I. Newhouse and the Business of News. New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
Poore, Ralph. "Alabama's Enterprising Newspaper The Mobile Press-Register and Its Forebears, 1813-1991." Unpublished manuscript, 1992. Mobile Public Library, Mobile, Alabama.
———. The Mobile Press-Register: The First 100 Years.." Unpublished manuscript, 2020; https://newspapering.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/mobile-register-first-100-years-v2-1-20211027.pdf.