Frank E. Gannett, a newspaper editor and publisher for more than fifty years, is probably best remembered for his promotion of freedom of the press through the ownership of a group of twenty-two newspapers, mostly in medium-sized cities in New York. Although the number of newspapers and their total circulation figures have been impressive since the Gannett Company's inception in 1924, perhaps more notable is the fact that Gannett made an effort to insure, even after his death, that the papers would retain editorial autonomy and would fulfill their journalistic responsibilities to their local communities.

Born to Joseph Charles and Maria Brooks Gannett on 15 September 1876, Frank Ernest Gannett (pronounced Gan-nett) entered the world in a farmhouse in western New York's Finger Lakes district, some forty miles from Rochester, a city where he would spend much of his adult life. Perhaps because of poor health resulting from a Civil...