The Advocate has been called Stamford's oldest continuing business.
The Intelligencer The paper's earliest origins come from
The Intelligencer, a newspaper originally run out of a small office on the south side of West Park (now Columbus Park in downtown Stamford) in April 1829. William Henry "Hen" Holly installed a printing press there, but despite some support from the community, he closed the publication after a few months for lack of revenue. Several town leaders then helped to finance the publication again, this time under the name
The Sentinel, which first appeared on February 16, 1830. Stamford was never without a local newspaper of one kind or another since then. The oldest known copy of
The Sentinel, dated June 22, 1830, is in Stamford's public library, the Ferguson Library. That issue, marked Volume 1, No. 19, consists of four sheets, 15 by 20 inches each, with six columns to a page. The motto of the newspaper, printed at the top of the front page, was: "Pledged to no party's arbitrary way, we follow Truth wher'er she leads the way." In the late 1940s, the 1947 film
Boomerang, directed by
Elia Kazan was shot almost entirely in Stamford, and partly at the newspaper's offices, then on Atlantic Street. Some members of the editorial staff were shown in the movie.
Times-Mirror and Tribune In 1977, the Gillespie family sold the paper to
Times Mirror Company, owner of
The Los Angeles Times. In 1978,
Anthony Dolan, a staff writer at the time, won a
Pulitzer Prize for reporting on city corruption. While in college, he had written for the
Yale Daily News, and interviewed Stamford resident and
Yale alumnus
William F. Buckley Jr. for that student newspaper. The two became friends, and when Dolan lost his job with Gannett, Buckley helped get him hired by
The Advocate. By 1979, Dolan had become tired of journalism and in 1980 went to work for
Ronald Reagan's campaign for president. Dolan went on to become a speechwriter in Reagan's White House. In 1980, the newspaper moved to a new building at the corner of Tresser and Washington Boulevards in downtown Stamford. The building was constructed by Frank Mercede & Sons Inc. under a contract signed by the Advocate's then-publisher Jay Shaw. In June 2000,
Tribune Company bought Times Mirror, incorporating
The Advocate into the
Chicago-based company's holdings.
The Advocate and its sister paper, the
Greenwich Time, were sold to Hearst for
US$62.4 million by
Tribune Company in a deal that closed November 1, 2007. The sale did not include Tribune-owned land in Stamford and
Greenwich, including the papers' printing presses. On August 8, 2008 the Hearst Corporation acquired the
Connecticut Post (Bridgeport, Conn.) and www.ConnPost.com, including seven non-daily newspapers, from MediaNews Group, Inc. and assumed management control of three additional daily newspapers in
Fairfield County, Conn., including The Advocate (Stamford),
Greenwich Time (Greenwich), and
The News-Times (Danbury), which had been managed for Hearst by MediaNews had managed under a management agreement that began in April 2007. In 2018,
The Advocate left its offices on Spring Street and returned downtown, setting up operations on the first floor of 1055 Washington Boulevard. ==Advocate name==