Asheville Citizen-Times

The Asheville Citizen-Times is a daily newspaper of Asheville, North Carolina. It was formed in 1991 as a result of a merger of the morning Asheville Citizen and the afternoon Asheville Times. It is owned by Gannett.

Founded in 1870 as a weekly, the Citizen became a daily newspaper in 1885. Writers Thomas Wolfe, O. Henry, both buried in Asheville, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a common visitor of Asheville, frequently could be found in the newsroom in earlier days. In 1930 the Citizen came under common ownership with the Times, which was first established in 1896 as the Asheville Gazette. The latter paper merged with a short-lived rival, the Asheville Evening News, to form the Asheville Gazette-News and was renamed The Asheville Times by new owner Charles A. Webb.

In 1954, the Citizen-Times was purchased by the Greenville News-Piedmont Company. In 1968 Greenville News-Piedmont merged with Southern Broadcasting Corporation to form Multimedia.

In 1986, $12 million was invested in offset printing presses and a new 44,000-square-foot (4,100 m²) production building in nearby Enka, with composed pages transmitted electronically from the downtown Asheville building located nine miles (14 km) away. In 1995, Multimedia was acquired by Gannett. In April 1997, the Citizen-Times became the first daily newspaper in Western North Carolina to launch a website; the site now receives tens of thousands of hits a day. In February 2011 the online editors changed the web format to show the previous day's letters as the latest letters to the editor which made only the paper purchasers able to read the current day's letters. Additional changes included blocking numerous online comment personalities.