him). His son John Stewart Bryan had given up his own legal career in 1900 to become a reporter working for the Dispatch and helped found the Associated Press and then became vice-president of the publishing company. Upon his father's death, John Stewart Bryan became owner and publisher of the two papers, but in 1914 sold a controlling interest in the Times-Dispatch to three families. He hired Douglas Southall Freeman as editor of the News Leader in 1915, and remained in control until becoming President of the College of William and Mary in 1934 (and publishing a biography of his father the following year). John Stewart Bryan reacquired the Times-Dispatch in 1940 when the two papers' business interests merged to form Richmond Newspapers, in which Bryan held a 54-percent interest. That conglomeration is now known as Media General. Other publishers in the Bryan family include D. Tennant Bryan and John Stewart Bryan III. In 1948, Virginius Dabney won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing while editorializing for the Times-Dispatch. On June 1, 1992, four days after its sponsored contestant Amanda Goad won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the News Leader, which had been losing circulation for many years, ceased publication and was folded into the Times-Dispatch. In 2021, Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his writing about the protest movements in Richmond in the wake of the murder of George Floyd leading to the removal of many Confederate monuments. Williams joined the paper in 1982 and has been a columnist since 1992. 2004 Mosul attack The Richmond Times-Dispatch drew national attention for its coverage of a December 21, 2004, attack by a suicide bomber on an American military base in Mosul, Iraq. The deadliest attack on an American military installation since the war began, the attack injured 69 people and killed 22, including two with the Virginia National Guard's Richmond-based 276th Engineer Battalion. Stories and photographs about the attack by a Times-Dispatch reporter embedded with the 276th were read, heard and seen across the nation. Tacky Christmas lights tour In 1990, The RTD borrowed an idea from a local entrepreneur, Barry "Mad Dog" Gottlieb, to encourage a "Tacky Christmas Lights Tour," also known by locals as the "Tacky Light Tour". Every week, the RTD lists the addresses of houses where the most tacky Christmas lights can be found. This tradition has begun to