In August 2000, the Gannett Company acquired Central Newspapers for US$2.6 billion, with the Eugene C. Pulliam Trust as the principal beneficiary of the sale.
Pulliam wrote and published "Window on the Right," a syndicated domestic-affairs column during the 1960s; wrote The Unchanging Responsibility of the American Newspaper in a Changing Society (1970); The People and the Press: Partners for Freedom (1965), coauthored with Frederic S. Marquardt; and South America, Land of the Future, Jewel of the Past (1951), coauthored with his wife, Nina Mason Pulliam.
Pulliam was born on May 3, 1889, in a sod dugout house at Ulysses in Grant County, Kansas, to Martha Ellen (Collins) and Reverend Irvin Brown Pulliam, who was a Methodist missionary sent to establish church congregations in the frontier towns of western Kansas.
He was also a cofounder, in 1909, with nine other students at DePauw of Sigma Delta Chi, a journalism fraternity that was later renamed the Society of Professional Journalists.
[2][4] Their son, Eugene S. Pulliam, was born on September 7, 1914, and joined the family business in 1935 as director of WIRE, an Indianapolis radio station his father owned at that time.
[1] Martha (Ott) Pulliam, a graduate of Franklin College, was publisher of the Lebanon (Indiana) Reporter from the early 1940s to December 1990.
[3][2] With financial backing from his first wife's family, Pulliam purchased the Daily Champion, which was the first of forty-six newspapers he eventually owned.
He subsequently expanded his holdings through acquisitions of newspapers in the eastern United States (in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), in the southeast (in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida), and in the Midwest (in Indiana and Kentucky).
He also served three successive terms as a member of the Associated Press’s board of directors, from 1961 to 1969,[4] as well as a vice president of the organization.
However, Pulliam was less willing to endorse Barry Goldwater's candidacy against President Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race.
[2] Pulliam died after suffering a heart attack at his retirement home in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 23, 1975, at the age of eighty-six.
[citation needed] In 1991 the Indianapolis Star won another Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of medical malpractice in Indiana.
The Eugene C. Pulliam Trust, which owned 78 percent of the company's stock, was the principal beneficiary of the transaction.
[15] In a somewhat controversial move[clarification needed] the trustees interpreted this clause loosely and declared that the merger would be the only way to prevent the corporation from suffering a long-term loss of value.