Marine Corps Times is a newspaper serving active, reserve and retired United States Marine Corps personnel and their families, providing news, information and analysis as well as community and lifestyle features, educational supplements, and resource guides. It is published 26 times per year. Marine Corps Times is published by the Sightline Media Group, which is a part of TEGNA Digital, which itself is owned by TEGNA, Inc. The group was called the Army Times Publishing Company until 1997, when it was sold to Gannett and renamed Gannett Government Media. In 2015, it was spun off into one of the digital properties of TEGNA, and renamed Sightline. In March 2016, TEGNA sold Sightline Media Group to Regent, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm controlled by investor Michael Reinstein.
History
Marine Corps Times traces its roots back to the 1940s, when Army Times, founded by Mel Ryder, had reporters covering the U.S. Army Air Corps and U.S. Army Air Forces. With the creation of the U.S. Air Force in 1947 came the birth of Air Force Times as a separate newspaper. Mr. Ryder began his newspaper career on the staff of Stars and Stripes selling and delivering papers to the troops on the front lines during World War I. In 1921 he joined Willard Kiplinger in forming the newsletter service, the Kiplinger Agency. He sold his interest in the agency in 1933 and began publishing Happy Days, a paper written for members of the Civilian Conservation Corps. His first order was for 400 copies and the first advertiser was GEICO. Next, Ryder started the publication of Army Times. The first issue was published in 1940 and the company was incorporated the same year. Marine Corps Times writer C. Mark Brinkley was among the first journalists to embed with ground troops in Afghanistan in November 2001 during Operation Swift Freedom, which was the Pentagon's first opportunity to Embed Journalists. Marine Corps Times and Brinkley were also responsible for exposing the fabricated military record claimed by Joshua Adam Garcia, a contestant on Food Network's 2007 season of "The Next Food Network Star," resulting in Garcia's resignation from the cooking competition reality show. In November 2010, senior writer Dan Lamothe broke the news that the Marine Corps had recommended former Cpl. Dakota Meyer for the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor, for bravery in Afghanistan in September 2009. Meyer's case was approved in July 2011, making him the first living Marine to receive the medal since the Vietnam War.
Awards
In 2005, Marine Corps Times received an Associated Press Managing Editors association Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Public Service in the under-40,000 circulation category for its investigative story on the recall of body armor. In spring 2011, Lamothe received the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's Maj. Megan McClung Award, which honors one journalist annually for dispatch reporting abroad. Lamothe was honored for his work in May and June 2010, when he embedded with 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, in Afghanistan's then-violent Marjah district. In fall 2011, Lamothe and staff photographer Thomas Brown received honorable mention from the Military Reporters and Editors organization for their blogging from the battlefield during the same embedded assignment. They finished behind the New York Times in MRE's online interactive award category.
