The Mercury was imagined into reality in 1931 by Shandy Hill, a seasoned editor, and William Hiester, a young man with a passion for journalism — and, more essential, access to
For the next several decades, The Mercury abided by an understood compact: In exchange for some updated version of a coin pressed into a newsboy’s ink-smudged hand, the newspaper provided you with information and context that could not be gleaned from reading school board minutes or watching local-access television.
“It’s as old as the press in America itself,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst. “It all starts with what your elected officials are doing, and what they’re doing with your tax money. This was so baked into the DNA of newspapers that nobody thought about it.”
The Mercury chronicled everyday Pottstown life, the bowling league scores and high school victories, the honor rolls and alumni reunions. It covered the “crime of the decade”: the tawdry 1982 murder of a millionaire developer. It established the annual Operation Holiday campaign that provides food and gifts to underprivileged children.
Nancy March, a former Mercury editor in chief, said she took pride in the time-intensive enterprise reporting that provided the people of Pottstown a voice. What it felt like, for example, for a mother to lose a child to the now-overshadowed epidemic of opioids.
“It gave them a place to work through their story,” Ms. March said.
The Mercury also crusaded: pushing for local government reform, fighting for the rights of crime victims, exposing deplorable conditions at a local institution for people with developmental disabilities. Its editorial writer, Thomas J. Hylton, won the newspaper’s second Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for essays that championed open-space preservation to ward against suburban sprawl.
Its first Pulitzer, though, reflected the intimacy between newspaper and community. In 1979, the Mercury photographer Tom Kelly III won for arresting images of a man on the loose and covered in blood, moments after he had killed his pregnant wife and attacked two family members.