Benjamin Flower Shaw

Notable work and positions

Dixon Telegraph (Illinois) - Editor and Publisher (1852-1909)
Shaw Media (predecessor: Shaw Newspapers) - Founder

Biography

Benjamin Flower Shaw was an American newspaper editor and publisher who founded the company that became Shaw Media. Born on a farm in Waverly, New York, on March 31, 1831, he was orphaned in his early teens. At 14 he delivered mail on horseback along a 100-mile route between Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Galena, Illinois, and at 16 he learned the printing trade at a plant in Rock Island, working with the Rock Island Advertiser. In the fall of 1851, at age 20, he came to Dixon, Illinois, to visit his sister and became involved with the newly launched Dixon Telegraph and Lee County Herald, becoming co-publisher on January 21, 1852, and sole proprietor and editor on April 30, 1854. He briefly traveled west during the Pike's Peak gold rush, working as a compositor and setting type on the first issue of the Rocky Mountain News, before returning to Dixon to resume editing and publishing the Telegraph. In 1856, at age 24, Shaw was one of a dozen Illinois newspaper editors who met in Decatur to organize opposition to the expansion of slavery, a meeting attended by Abraham Lincoln as the group's legal adviser; the editors' resolutions led to the first Illinois convention of the newly formed Republican Party, held in Bloomington, where Shaw served on the resolutions committee. He continued to lead the Telegraph until his death in 1909 at age 78. The paper has remained under Shaw family ownership ever since, and Shaw Media is now described as the third oldest, continuously owned and operated family newspaper company in the United States.

Career highlights

• Illinois Republican Party founding 1856 · Participated in the Decatur editorial convention, attended by Abraham Lincoln, that led to the state's first Republican Party convention in Bloomington.
• Founding of a media dynasty · Established what has grown into Shaw Media, an Illinois and Iowa newspaper publisher still owned by his descendants.