The Times Leader

The Times Leader covers Northeastern Pennsylvania. Our seven-day news product is flagship of The Times Leader Media Group, a collection of print and digital products that cover the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area. Our website, timesleader.com, is the most-read news website in Luzerne County. The Times Leader is headquartered at 90 E. Market St. in Wilkes-Barre, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Market Street. We also have offices in Pittston and Clarks Summit. In 1797, the Wilkes-Barre Gazette and Luzerne Advertiser became the first newspaper to serve the Wyoming Valley. Since then, a variety of community weeklies, foreign language publications and political notices have come and gone. Today’s Times Leader traces its beginnings to 1907, when Fred C. Kirkendall and Col. Ernest G. Smith combined their newspapers, the Wilkes-Barre Times and the Times Leader. The Times Leader continued for 32 years until 1939, when a major strike forced its merger with the Wilkes-Barre Record and the Evening News to form the Wilkes-Barre Publishing Company. In 1972, after the flood caused by the remains of Hurricane Agnes devastated the Wyoming Valley, the local newspapers combined to form one publication with the unwieldy name Wilkes Barre Times Leader/The Evening News/Wilkes-Barre Record. Then, in 1978, the paper was purchased by Capital Cities Corp. and renamed the Times Leader. The past decades have seen many changes at the Times Leader. A highly successful Sunday edition began publication in 1987. The newspaper had published under various owners until 2013, when Civitas Media was formed, and owned the publications until 2019. In August 2019 Avant Publications acquired the Times Leader Media Group, the first time in 4 decades that the Times Leader was privately owned. Combined with its award-winning digital portfolio — timesleader.com, iOS and Android apps, and social media — the Times Leader has the largest audience in Luzerne County.